16951	----	Richard Lovell Edgeworth A SELECTION FROM HIS MEMOIRS EDITED BY BEATRIX L. TOLLEMACHE (HON. MRS. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE) RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL & CO. KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN LONDON 1896 By THE SAME AUTHOR Engelberg, and Other Verses. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 6s. Jonquille, or, The Swiss Smuggler. Translated from the French of MADAME COMBE. Crown 8vo. 6s. Grisons Incidents in Olden Times. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. LONDON RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL & CO. LIFE IS AN INN THERE is an inn where many a guest May enter, tarry, take his rest. When he departs there's nought to pay, Only he carries nought away. 'Not so,' I cried, 'for raiment fine, Sweet thoughts, heart-joys, and hopes that shine, May clothe anew his flitting form, As wings that change the creeping worm. His toil-worn garb he casts aside, And journeys onward glorified.' B. L. T. RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH CHAPTER 1 Some years ago, I came across the Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth in a second-hand bookshop, and found it so full of interest and amusement, that I am tempted to draw the attention of other readers to it. As the volumes are out of print, I have not hesitated to make long extracts from them. The first volume is autobiographical, and the narrative is continued in the second volume by Edgeworth's daughter Maria, who was her father's constant companion, and was well fitted to carry out his wish that she should complete the Memoirs. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was born at Bath in 1744. He was a shining example of what a good landlord can do for his tenants, and how an active mind will always find objects of interest without constantly requiring what are called amusements; for the leisure class should be like Sundays in a week, and as the ideal Sunday should be a day when we can store up good and beautiful thoughts to refresh us during the week, a day when there is no hurry, no urgent business to trouble us, a day when we have time to rise above the sordid details of life and enjoy its beauties; so it seems to me that those who are not obliged to work for their living should do their part in the world by adding to its store of good and wise thoughts, by cultivating the arts and raising the standard of excellence in them, and by bringing to light truths which had been forgotten, or which had been hidden from our forefathers. Richard Edgeworth was eminently a practical man, impulsive, as we learn from his imprudent marriage at nineteen, but with a strong sense of duty. His mother, who was Welsh, brought him up in habits of thrift and industry very unlike those of his ancestors, which he records in the early pages of his Memoirs. His great-grandmother seems to have been a woman of strong character and courage in spite of her belief in fairies and her dread of them, for he writes that 'while she was living at Liscard, she was, on some sudden alarm, obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected, and answered that she had left it "stuck in the barrel of black salt." Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by herself to the room where the gunpowder was, found the candle as the girl had described, put her hand carefully underneath it, carried it safely out, and when she got to the bottom of the stairs dropped on her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance' When we remember that it was Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, who trained and encouraged her first efforts in literature, we feel that we owe him a debt of gratitude; but our interest is increased when we read his Memoirs, for we then find ourselves brought into close contact with a very intelligent and vigorous mind, keen to take part in the scientific experiments of the day, while his upright moral character and earnest and well-directed efforts to improve his Irish property win our admiration; and when we remember that he married in succession four wives, and preserved harmony among the numerous members of his household, our admiration becomes wonder, and we would fain learn the secret of his success. One element in his success doubtless was that he kept every one around him usefully employed, and in the manner most suited to each. He knew how to develop innate talent, and did not crush or overpower those around him. He owed much to the early training of a sensible mother, and he gives an anecdote of his early childhood, which I will quote:-- 'My mother was not blind to my faults. She saw the danger of my passionate temper. It was a difficult task to correct it; though perfectly submissive to her, I was with others rebellious and outrageous in my anger. My mother heard continual complaints of me; yet she wisely forbore to lecture or punish me for every trifling misdemeanour; she seized proper occasions to make a strong impression upon my mind. 'One day my elder brother Tom, who, as I have said, was almost a man when I was a little child, came into the nursery where I was playing, and where the maids were ironing. Upon some slight provocation or contradiction from him, I flew into a violent passion; and, snatching up one of the boxirons which the maid had just laid down, I flung it across the table at my brother. He stooped instantly; and, thank God! it missed him. There was a redhot heater in it, of which I knew nothing until I saw it thrown out, and until I heard the scream from the maids. They seized me, and dragged me downstairs to my mother. Knowing that she was extremely fond of my brother, and that she was of a warm indignant temper, they expected that signal vengeance would burst upon me. They all spoke at once. When my mother heard what I had done, I saw she was struck with horror, but she said not one word in anger to me. She ordered everybody out of the room except myself, and then drawing me near her, she spoke to me in a mild voice, but in a most serious manner. First, she explained to me the nature of the crime which I had run the hazard of committing; she told me she was sure that I had no intention seriously to hurt my brother, and did not know that if the iron had hit my brother, it must have killed him. While I felt this first shock, and whilst the horror of murder was upon me, my mother seized the moment to conjure me to try in future to command my passions. I remember her telling me that I had an uncle by the mother's side who had such a violent temper, that in a fit of passion one of his eyes actually started out of its socket. "You," said my mother to me, "have naturally a violent temper; if you grow up to be a man without learning to govern it, it will be impossible for you then to command yourself; and there is no knowing what crime you may in a fit of passion commit, and how miserable you may, in consequence of it, become. You are but a very young child, yet I think you can understand me. Instead of speaking to you as I do at this moment, I might punish you severely; but I think it better to treat you like a reasonable creature. My wish is to teach you to command your temper--nobody can do that for you so well as you can do it for yourself." 'As nearly as I can recollect, these were my mother's words; I am certain this was the sense of what she then said to me. The impression made by the earnest solemnity with which she spoke never, during the whole course of my life, was effaced from my mind. From that moment I determined to govern my temper.' Acting upon the old adage that example is better than precept, his mother taught him at an early age to observe the good and bad qualities of the persons he met. The study of character she justly felt to be most important, and yet it is not one of the subjects taught in schools except by personal collision with other boys, and incidentally in reading history. When sent to school at Warwick, he learned not only the first rudiments of grammar, but 'also the rudiments of that knowledge which leads us to observe the difference of tempers and characters in our fellow-creatures. The marking how widely they differ, and by what minute varieties they are distinguished, continues, to the end of life, an inexhaustible subject of discrimination.' May not Maria have gained much valuable training in the art of novel-writing from a father who was so impressed with the value of the study of character? The Gospel precept which we read as 'Judge not,' should surely be translated 'Condemn not,' and does not forbid a mental exercise which is necessary in our intercourse with others. Among the circumstances which had considerable influence on his character, he mentions: 'My mother was reading to me some passages from Shakespeare's plays, marking the characters of Coriolanus and of Julius Caesar, which she admired. The contempt which Coriolanus expresses for the opinion and applause of the vulgar, for "the voices of the greasyheaded multitude," suited well with that disdain for low company with which I had been first inspired by the fable of the Lion and the Cub.* It is probable that I understood the speeches of Coriolanus but imperfectly; yet I know that I sympathised with my mother's admiration, my young spirit was touched by his noble character, by his generosity, and, above all, by his filial piety and his gratitude to his mother.' He mentions also that 'some traits in the history of Cyrus, which was read to me, seized my imagination, and, next to Joseph in the Old Testament, Cyrus became the favourite of my childhood. My sister and I used to amuse ourselves with playing Cyrus at the court of his grandfather Astyages. At the great Persian feasts, I was, like young Cyrus, to set an example of temperance, to eat nothing but watercresses, to drink nothing but water, and to reprove the cupbearer for making the king, my grandfather, drunk. To this day I remember the taste of those water-cresses; and for those who love to trace the characters of men in the sports of children, I may mention that my character for sobriety, if not for water-drinking, has continued through life.' * In Gay's Fables. When Richard Edgeworth encouraged his daughter Maria's literary tastes, he was doubtless mindful how much pleasure and support his own mother had derived from studying the best authors; and when we read later of the affectionate terms on which Maria stood with her various stepmothers and their families, we cannot help thinking that she must have inherited at least one of the beautiful traits in her grandmother's character which Richard Edgeworth especially dwells on: 'She had the most generous disposition that I ever met with; not only that common generosity, which parts with money, or money's worth, freely, and almost without the right hand knowing what the left hand doeth; but she had also an entire absence of selfish consideration. Her own wishes or opinions were never pursued merely because they were her own; the ease and comfort of everybody about her were necessary for her well-being. Every distress, as far as her fortune, or her knowledge, or her wit or eloquence could reach, was alleviated or removed; and, above all, she could forgive, and sometimes even forget injuries.' Richard's taste for science early showed itself, when at seven years old his curiosity was excited by an electric battery which was applied to his mother's paralysed side. He says:-- 'At this time electricity was but little known in Ireland, and its fame as a cure for palsy had been considerably magnified. It, as usual, excited some sensation in the paralytic limbs on the first trials. One of the experiments on my mother failed of producing a shock, and Mr. Deane seemed at a loss to account for it. I had observed that the wire which was used to conduct the electric fluid, had, as it hung in a curve from the instrument to my mother's arm, touched the hinge of a table which was in the way, and I had the courage to mention this circumstance, which was the real cause of failure.' It was when he was eight years old, and while travelling with his father, that his attention was caught by 'a man carrying a machine five or six feet in diameter, of an oval form, and composed of slender ribs of steel. I begged my father to inquire what it was. We were told that it was the skeleton of a lady's hoop. It was furnished with hinges, which permitted it to fold together in a small compass, so that more than two persons might sit on one seat of a coach--a feat not easily performed, when ladies were encompassed with whalebone hoops of six feet extent. My curiosity was excited by the first sight of this machine, probably more than another child's might have been, because previous agreeable associations had given me some taste for mechanics, which was still a little further increased by the pleasure I took in examining this glittering contrivance. Thus even the most trivial incidents in childhood act reciprocally as cause and effect in forming our tastes.' It was in 1754 that Mrs. Edgeworth, continuing much out of health, resolved to consult a certain Lord Trimblestone, who had been very successful in curing various complaints. Lord Trimblestone received Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth most cordially and hospitably, and though he could not hope to cure her, recommended some palliatives. He had more success with another lady whose disorder was purely nervous. His treatment of her was so original that I must quote it at length: 'Instead of a grave and forbidding physician, her host, she found, was a man of most agreeable manners. Lady Trimblestone did everything in her power to entertain her guest, and for two or three days the demon of ennui was banished. At length the lady's vapours returned; everything appeared changed. Melancholy brought on a return of alarming nervous complaints--convulsions of the limbs --perversion of the understanding--a horror of society; in short, all the complaints that are to be met with in an advertisement enumerating the miseries of a nervous patient. In the midst of one of her most violent fits, four mutes, dressed in white, entered her apartment; slowly approaching her, they took her without violence in their arms, and without giving her time to recollect herself, conveyed her into a distant chamber hung with black and lighted with green tapers. From the ceiling, which was of a considerable height, a swing was suspended, in which she was placed by the mutes, so as to be seated at some distance from the ground. One of the mutes set the swing in motion; and as it approached one end of the room, she was opposed by a grim menacing figure armed with a huge rod of birch. When she looked behind her, she saw a similar figure at the other end of the room, armed in the same manner. The terror, notwithstanding the strange circumstances which surrounded her, was not of that sort which threatens life; but every instant there was an immediate hazard of bodily pain. After some time, the mutes appeared again, with great composure took the lady out of the swing, and conducted her to her apartment. When she had reposed some time, a servant came to inform her that tea was ready. Fear of what might be the consequence of a refusal prevented her from declining to appear. No notice was taken of what had happened, and the evening and the next day passed without any attack of her disorder. On the third day the vapours returned--the mutes reappeared--the menacing flagellants again affrighted her, and again she enjoyed a remission of her complaints. By degrees the fits of her disorder became less frequent, the ministration of her tormentors less necessary, and in time the habits of hypochondriacism were so often interrupted, and such a new series of ideas was introduced into her mind, that she recovered perfect health, and preserved to the end of her life sincere gratitude for her adventurous physician.' Three years were spent by Richard at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, while his vacations were often passed at Bath by the wish of his father, who was anxious that his son should be introduced to good society at an early age. It was there that Richard saw Beau Nash,' the popular monarch of Bath,' and also 'the remains of the celebrated Lord Chesterfield. I looked in vain for that fire, which we expect to see in the eye of a man of wit and genius. He was obviously unhappy, and a melancholy spectacle.' Of the young ladies he says: 'I soon perceived that those who made the best figure in the ballroom were not always qualified to please in conversation; I saw that beauty and grace were sometimes accompanied by a frivolous character, by disgusting envy, or despicable vanity. All this I had read of in poetry and prose, but there is a wide difference, especially among young people, between what is read and related, and what is actually seen. Books and advice make much more impression in proportion as we grow older. We find by degrees that those who lived before us have recorded as the result of their experience the very things that we observe to be true.' It was while still at college that he married Miss Elers without waiting for his father's consent; he soon found that his young wife did not sympathise with his pursuits; but he adds, 'Though I heartily repented my folly, I determined to bear with firmness and temper the evil, which I had brought upon myself. Perhaps pride had some share in my resolution.' He had a son before he was twenty, and soon afterwards took his wife to Edgeworth Town to introduce her to his parents; but a few days after his arrival his mother, who had long been an invalid, felt that her end was approaching, and calling him to her bedside, told him, with a sort of pleasure, that she felt she should die before night. She added: 'If there is a state of just retribution in another world, I must be happy, for I have suffered during the greatest part of my life, and I know that I did not deserve it by my thoughts or actions.' Her dying advice to him was,'"My son, learn how to say No." She warned me further of an error into which, from the vivacity of my temper, I was most likely to fall. "Your inventive faculty," said she, "will lead you eagerly into new plans; and you may be dazzled by some new scheme before you have finished, or fairly tried what you had begun. Resolve to finish; never procrastinate."' CHAPTER 2 It was in 1765, while stopping at Chester and examining a mechanical exhibition there, that Edgeworth first heard of Dr. Darwin, who had lately invented a carriage which could turn in a small compass without danger of upsetting. Richard on hearing this determined to try his hand on coach building, and had a handsome phaeton constructed upon the same principle; this he showed in London to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, and mentioned that he owed the original idea to Dr. Darwin. He then wrote to the latter describing the reception of his invention, and was invited to his house. The doctor was out when he arrived at Lichfield, but Mrs. Darwin received him, and after some conversation on books and prints asked him to drink tea. He discovered later that Dr. Darwin had imagined him to be a coachmaker, but that Mrs. Darwin had found out the mistake. 'When supper was nearly finished, a loud rapping at the door announced the doctor. There was a bustle in the hall, which made Mrs. Darwin get up and go to the door. Upon her exclaiming that they were bringing in a dead man, I went to the hall: I saw some persons, directed by one whom I guessed to be Dr. Darwin, carrying a man, who appeared motionless. "He is not dead," said Dr. Darwin. "He is only dead drunk. I found him," continued the doctor, "nearly suffocated in a ditch; I had him lifted into my carriage, and brought hither, that we might take care of him to-night." Candles came, and what was the surprise of the doctor and of Mrs. Darwin to find that the person whom he had saved was Mrs. Darwin's brother! who, for the first time in his life, as I was assured, had been intoxicated in this manner, and who would undoubtedly have perished had it not been for Dr. Darwin's humanity. 'During this scene I had time to survey my new friend, Dr. Darwin. He was a large man, fat, and rather clumsy; but intelligence and benevolence were painted in his countenance. He had a considerable impediment in his speech, a defect which is in general painful to others; but the doctor repaid his auditors so well for making them wait for his wit or his knowledge, that he seldom found them impatient.' At Lichfield he met Mr. Bolton of Snow Hill, Birmingham, who asked him to his house, and showed him over the principal manufactories of Birmingham, where he further improved his knowledge of practical mechanics. His time was now principally devoted to inventions; he received a silver medal in 1768 from the Society of Arts for a perambulator, as he calls it, an instrument for measuring land. This is a curious instance of the changed use of a word, as we now associate perambulators with babies. In 1769 he received the Society's gold medal for various machines, and about this time produced what might have been the forerunner of the bicycle, 'a huge hollow wheel made very light, withinside of which, in a barrel of six feet diameter, a man should walk. Whilst he stepped thirty inches, the circumference of the large wheel, or rather wheels, would revolve five feet on the ground; and as the machine was to roll on planks, and on a plane somewhat inclined, when once the vis inertia of the machine should be overcome, it would carry on the man within it as fast as he could possibly walk. ... It was not finished; I had not yet furnished it with the means of stopping or moderating its motion. A young lad got into it, his companions launched it on a path which led gently down hill towards a very steep chalk-pit. This pit was at such a distance as to be out of their thoughts when they set the wheel in motion. On it ran. The lad withinside plied his legs with all his might. The spectators who at first stood still to behold the operation were soon alarmed by the shouts of their companion, who perceived his danger. The vehicle became quite ungovernable; the velocity increased as it ran down hill. Fortunately, the boy contrived to jump from his rolling prison before it reached the chalk-pit; but the wheel went on with such velocity as to outstrip its pursuers, and, rolling over the edge of the precipice, it was dashed to pieces. 'The next day, when I came to look for my machine, intending to try it upon some planks, which had been laid for it, I found, to my no small disappointment, that the object of all my labours and my hopes was lying at the bottom of a chalk-pit, broken into a thousand pieces. I could not at that time afford to construct another wheel of that sort, and I cannot therefore determine what might have been the success of my scheme.' He goes on to say: 'I shall mention a sailing carriage that I tried on this common. The carriage was light, steady, and ran with amazing velocity. One day, when I was preparing for a sail in it with my friend and schoolfellow, Mr. William Foster, my wheel-boat escaped from its moorings just as we were going to step on board. With the utmost difficulty we overtook it; and as I saw three or four stage-coaches on the road, and feared that this sailing chariot might frighten their horses, I, at the hazard of my life, got into my carriage while it was under full sail, and then, at a favourable part of the road, I used the means I had of guiding it easily out of the way. But the sense of the mischief which must have ensued if I had not succeeded in getting into the machine at the proper place, and stopping it at the right moment, was so strong, as to deter me from trying any more experiments on this carriage in such a dangerous place.' I have already given the changed use of the word perambulator. As an example of the different use of a word in the last century, I may mention telegraph, by which he means signalling either by moving wooden arms or by showing lights. This mode of conveying a message he first applied in order to win a wager: 'A famous match was at that time pending at Newmarket between two horses that were in every respect as nearly equal as possible. Lord March, one evening at Ranelagh, expressed his regret to Sir Francis Delaval that he was not able to attend Newmarket at the next meeting. "I am obliged," said he, "to stay in London; I shall, however, be at the Turf Coffee-house; I shall station fleet horses on the road to bring me the earliest intelligence of the event of the race, and I shall manage my bets accordingly." 'I asked at what time in the evening he expected to know who was winner. He said about nine in the evening. I asserted that I should be able to name the winning horse at four o'clock in the afternoon. Lord March heard my assertion with so much incredulity, as to urge me to defend myself; and at length I offered to lay five hundred pounds that I would in London name the winning horse at Newmarket at five o'clock in the evening of the day when the great match in question was to be run.' The wager was however given up when Edgeworth told Lord March that he did not depend upon the fleetness or strength of horses to carry the desired intelligence. His friend, Sir Francis Delaval, immediately put up under his directions an apparatus between his house and part of Piccadilly. He adds: 'I also set up a night telegraph between a house which Sir Francis Delaval occupied at Hampstead, and one to which I had access in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. This nocturnal telegraph answered well, but was too expensive for common use.' Later on he writes to Dr. Darwin: 'I have been employed for two months in experiments upon a telegraph of my own invention. By day, at eighteen or twenty miles distance, I show, by four pointers, isosceles triangles, twenty feet high, on four imaginary circles, eight imaginary points, which correspond with the figures 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, so that seven thousand different combinations are formed, of four figures each, which refer to a dictionary of words. By night, white lights are used.' Dr. Darwin in reply says: 'The telegraph you described, I dare say, would answer the purpose. It would be like a giant wielding his long arms and talking with his fingers: and those long arms might be covered with lamps in the night.' It is curious now to read Mr. Edgeworth's words: 'I will venture to predict that it will at some future period be generally practised, not only in these islands, but that it will in time become a means of communication between the most distant parts of the world, wherever arts and sciences have civilised mankind.' It was some years later, in 1794, when Ireland was in a disturbed state, and threatened by a French invasion, that Edgeworth laid his scheme for telegraphs before the Government, and offered to keep open communication between Dublin and Cork if the Government would pay the expense. He made a trial between two hills fifteen miles apart, and a message was sent and an answer received in five minutes. The Government paid little attention to his offer, and finally refused it. Two months later the French were on the Irish coasts, and great confusion and distress was occasioned by the want of accurate news. 'The troops were harassed with contradictory orders and forced marches for want of intelligence, and from that indecision, which must always be the consequence of insufficient information. Many days were spent in terror, and in fruitless wishes for an English fleet. ... At last Ireland was providentially saved by the change of the wind, which prevented the enemy from effecting a landing on her coast.' Another of Edgeworth's inventions was a one-wheeled carriage adapted to go over narrow roads; it was made fast by shafts to the horse's sides, and was furnished with two weights or counterpoises that hung below the shafts. In this carriage he travelled to Birmingham and astonished the country folk on the way. I must now give a sketch of Edgeworth's matrimonial adventures. They began after a strange fashion, when, at fifteen, he and some young companions had a merry-making at his sister's marriage, and one of the party putting on a white cloak as a surplice, proposed to marry Richard to a young lady who was his favourite partner. With the door key as a ring the mock parson gabbled over a few words of the marriage service. When Richard's father heard of this mock marriage he was so alarmed that he treated it seriously, and sued and got a divorce for his son in the ecclesiastical court. It was while visiting Dr. Darwin at Lichfield that Edgeworth made some friendships which influenced his whole life. At the Bishop's Palace, where Canon Seward lived, he first met Miss Honora Sneyd, who was brought up as a daughter by Mrs. Seward. He was much struck by her beauty and by her mental gifts, and says: 'Now for the first time in my life, I saw a woman that equalled the picture of perfection which existed in my imagination. I had long suffered much from the want of that cheerfulness in a wife, without which marriage could not be agreeable to a man with such a temper as mine. I had borne this evil, I believe, with patience; but my not being happy at home exposed me to the danger of being too happy elsewhere.' He describes in another place his first wife as 'prudent, domestic, and affectionate; but she was not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles; and the lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render home delightful.' His friend, Mr. Day,* was also intimate at the Palace, but did not admire Honora at that time (1770) as much as Edgeworth did. Mr. Day thought 'she danced too well; she had too much an air of fashion in her dress and manners; and her arms were not sufficiently round and white to please him.' * The author of Sandford and Merton. He was at this time much preoccupied with an orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom he had taken from the Foundling Hospital, and whom he was educating with the idea of marrying her ultimately. Honora, on the other hand, had received the addresses of Mr. Andre, afterwards Major Andre, who was shot as a spy during the American War. But want of fortune caused the parents on both sides to discourage this attachment, and it was broken off. It was in 1771 that Mr. Day, having placed Sabrina at a boarding-school, became conscious of Honora's attractions, and began to think of marrying her. 'He wrote me one of the most eloquent letters I ever read,' says Edgeworth, 'to point out to me the folly and meanness of indulging a hopeless passion for any woman, let her merit be what it might; declaring at the same time that he "never would marry so as to divide himself from his chosen friend. Tell me," said he, "have you sufficient strength of mind totally to subdue love that cannot be indulged with peace, or honour, or virtue?" 'I answered that nothing but trial could make me acquainted with the influence which reason might have over my feelings; that I would go with my family to Lichfield, where I could be in the company of the dangerous object; and that I would faithfully acquaint him with all my thoughts and feelings. We went to Lichfield, and stayed there for some time with Mr. Day. I saw him continually in company with Honora Sneyd. I saw that he was received with approbation, and that he looked forward to marrying her at no very distant period. When I saw this, I can affirm with truth that I felt pleasure, and even exultation. I looked to the happiness of two people for whom I had the most perfect esteem, without the intervention of a single sentiment or feeling that could make me suspect I should ever repent having been instrumental to their union.' Later on Mr. Day wrote a long letter to Honora, describing his scheme of life (which was very peculiar), and his admiration for her, and asking whether she could return his affections and be willing to lead the secluded life which was his ideal. This letter he gave to Edgeworth to deliver. 'I took the packet; my friend requested that I would go to the Palace and deliver it myself. I went, and I delivered it with real satisfaction to Honora. She desired me to come next morning for an answer. ... I gave the answer to Mr. Day, and left him to peruse it by himself. When I returned, I found him actually in a fever. The letter contained an excellent answer to his arguments in favour of the rights of men, and a clear, dispassionate view of the rights of women. 'Miss Honora Sneyd would not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions. She did not feel that seclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness. Upon terms of reasonable equality she supposed that mutual confidence might best subsist. She said that, as Mr. Day had decidedly declared his determination to live in perfect seclusion from what is usually called the world, it was fit she should decidedly declare that she would not change her present mode of life, with which she had no reason to be dissatisfied, for any dark and untried system that could be proposed to her. . . . One restraint, which had acted long and steadily upon my feelings, was now removed; my friend was no longer attached to Miss Honora Sneyd. My former admiration of her returned with unabated ardour. . . . This admiration was unknown to everybody but Mr. Day; ... he represented to me the danger, the criminality of such an attachment; I knew that there is but one certain method of escaping such dangers --flight. I resolved to go abroad.' CHAPTER 3 Mr. Day and Edgeworth went to France, and the latter spent nearly two years at Lyons, where his wife joined him. Here he found interest and occupation in some engineering works by which the course of the Rhone was to be diverted and some land gained to enlarge the city, which lies hemmed in between the Rhone and the Saone. When the works were nearly completed, an old boatman warned Edgeworth 'that a tremendous flood might be expected in ten days from the mountains of Savoy. I represented this to the company, and proposed to employ more men, and to engage, by increased wages, those who were already at work, to continue every day till it was dark, but I could not persuade them to a sudden increase of their expenditure. . . . At five or six o'clock one morning, I was awakened by a prodigious noise on the ramparts under my windows. I sprang out of bed, and saw numbers of people rushing towards the Rhone. I foreboded the disaster! dressed myself, and hastened to the river. . . When I reached the Rhone, I beheld a tremendous sight! All the work of several weeks, carried on daily by nearly a hundred men, had been swept away. Piles, timber, barrows, tools, and large parts of expensive machinery were all carried down the torrent, and thrown in broken pieces upon the banks. The principal part of the machinery had been erected upon an island opposite the rampart; here there still remained some valuable timber and engines, which might, probably, be saved by immediate exertion. The old boatman, whom I have mentioned before, was at the water-side; I asked him to row me over to the island, that I might give orders how to preserve what remained belonging to the company. My old friend, the boatman, represented to me, with great kindness, the imminent danger to which I should expose myself. "Sir," he added, "the best swimmer in Lyons, unless he were one of the Rhone-men, could not save himself if the boat overset, and you cannot swim at all." '"Very true," I replied, "but the boat will not overset; and both my duty and my honour require that I should run every hazard for those who have put so much trust in me." My old boatman took me over safely, and left me on the island; but in returning by himself, the poor fellow's little boat was caught by a wave, and it skimmed to the bottom like a slate or an oyster-shell that is thrown obliquely into the water. A general exclamation was uttered from the shore; but, in a few minutes, the boatman was seen sitting upon a row of piles in the middle of the river, wringing his long hair with great composure. 'I have mentioned this boatman repeatedly as an old man, and such he was to all appearance; his hair was grey, his face wrinkled, his back bent, and all his limbs and features had the appearance of those of a man of sixty, yet his real age was but twenty-seven years. He told me that he was the oldest boatman on the Rhone; that his younger brothers had been worn out before they were twenty-five years old.' The French society at Lyons included many agreeable people; but Edgeworth singles out from among them, as his special friend, the Marquis de la Poype, who understood English, and was well acquainted with English literature. He pressed Edgeworth to pay him a visit at his Chateau in Dauphiny, and the latter adds: 'I promised to pass with him some of the Christmas holidays. An English gentleman went with me. We arrived in the evening at a very antique building, surrounded by a moat, and with gardens laid out in the style which was common in England in the beginning of the last century. These were enclosed by high walls, intersected by canals, and cut into parterres by sandy walks. We were ushered into a good drawing-room, the walls of which were furnished with ancient tapestry. When dinner was served, we crossed a large and lofty hall, that was hung round with armour, and with the spoils of the chase; we passed into a moderate-sized eating-room, in which there was no visible fireplace, but which was sufficiently heated by invisible stoves. The want of the cheerful light of a fire cast a gloom over our repast, and the howling of the wind did not contribute to lessen this dismal effect. But the dinner was good, and the wine, which was produced from the vineyard close to the house, was excellent. Madame de la Poype, and two or three of her friends, who were on a visit at her house, conversed agreeably, and all feeling of winter and seclusion was forgotten. 'At night, when I was shown into my chamber, the footman asked if I chose to have my bed warmed. I inquired whether it was well aired; he assured me, with a tone of integrity, that I had nothing to fear, for "that it had not been slept in for half a year." The French are not afraid of damp beds, but they have a great dread of catching some infectious disease from sleeping in any bed in which a stranger may have recently lain. 'My bedchamber at this chateau was hung with tapestry, and as the footman assured me of the safety of my bed, he drew aside a piece of the tapestry, which discovered a small recess in the wall that held a grabat, in which my servant was invited to repose. My servant was an Englishman, whose indignation nothing but want of words to express it could have concealed; he deplored my unhappy lot; as for himself, he declared, with a look of horror, that nothing could induce him to go into such a pigeon-hole. I went to visit the accommodations of my companion, Mr. Rosenhagen. I found him in a spacious apartment hung all round with tapestry, so that there was no appearance of any windows. I was far from being indifferent to the comfort of a good dry bed; but poor Mr. Rosenhagen, besides being delicate, was hypochondriac. With one of the most rueful countenances I ever beheld, he informed me that he must certainly die of cold. His teeth chattered whilst he pointed to the tapestry at one end of the room, which waved to and fro with the wind; and, looking behind it, I found a large, stone casement window without a single pane of glass, or shutters of any kind. He determined not to take off his clothes; but I, gaining courage from despair, undressed, went to bed, and never slept better in my life, or ever awakened in better health or spirits than at ten o'clock the next morning. 'After breakfast the Marquis took us to visit the Grotto de la Baume, which was at the distance of not more than two leagues from his house. We were most hospitably received at the house of an old officer, who was Seigneur of the place. His hall was more amply furnished with implements of the chase and spoils of the field than any which I have ever seen, or ever heard described. There were nets of such dimensions, and of such strength, as were quite new to me; bows, cross-bows, of prodigious power; guns of a length and weight that could not be wielded by the strength of modern arms; some with old matchlocks, and with rests to be stuck into the ground, and others with wheel-locks; besides modern fire-arms of all descriptions; horns of deer, and tusks of wild boars, were placed in compartments in such numbers, that every part of the walls was covered either with arms or trophies. 'The master of the mansion, in bulk, dress, and general appearance, was suited to the style of life which might be expected from what we had seen at our entrance. He was above six feet high, strong, and robust, though upwards of sixty years of age; he wore a leather jerkin, and instead of having his hair powdered, and tied in a long queue, according to the fashion of the day, he wore his own short grey locks; his address was plain, frank, and hearty, but by no means coarse or vulgar. He was of an ancient family, but of a moderate fortune.' Here Edgeworth adds a long description of the grotto and its stalactites. They returned to dine with the old officer at his castle. 'Our dinner was in its arrangement totally unlike anything I had seen in France, or anywhere else. It consisted of a monstrous, but excellent, wild boar ham; this, and a large savoury pie of different sorts of game, were the principal dishes; which, with some common vegetables, amply satisfied our hunger. The blunt hospitality of this rural baron was totally different from that which is to be met with in remote parts of the country of England. It was more the open-heartedness of a soldier than the roughness of a squire.' During the winter of 1772 Edgeworth was busy making plans for flour-mills to be erected on a piece of land gained from the river. But his stay in Lyons was cut short as the news reached him in March 1773 that Mrs. Edgeworth, who had returned to England for her confinement, had died after giving birth to a daughter. He travelled home with his son through Burgundy and Paris, and on reaching England arranged to meet Mr. Day at Woodstock. His friend greeted him with the words,' Have you heard anything of Honora Sneyd ?' Mr. Edgeworth continues: 'I assured him that I had heard nothing but what he had told me when he was in France; that she had some disease in her eyes, and that it was feared she would lose her sight.' I added that I was resolved to offer her my hand, even if she had undergone such a dreadful privation. '"My dear friend," said he, "while virtue and honour forbade you to think of her, I did everything in my power to separate you; but now that you are both at liberty, I have used the utmost expedition to reach you on your arrival in England, that I might be the first to tell you that Honora is in perfect health and beauty, improved in person and in mind; and, though surrounded by lovers, still her own mistress." 'At this moment I enjoyed the invaluable reward of my steady adherence to the resolution which I had formed on leaving England, never to keep up the slightest intercourse with her by letter, message, or inquiry. I enjoyed also the proof my friend gave me of his generous affection. Mr. Day had now come several hundred miles for the sole purpose of telling me of the fair prospects before me. . . . 'A new era in my life was now beginning. ... I went directly to Lichfield, to Dr. Darwin's. The doctor was absent, but his sister, an elderly maiden lady, who then kept house for him, received me kindly. '"You will excuse me," said the good lady, "for not making tea for you this evening, as I am engaged to the Miss Sneyds; but perhaps you will accompany me, as I am sure you will be welcome." 'It was summer--We found the drawing-room at Mr. Sneyd's filled by all my former acquaintances and friends, who had, without concert among themselves, assembled as if to witness the meeting of two persons, whose sentiments could scarcely be known even to the parties themselves. 'I have been told that the last person whom I addressed or saw, when I came into the room, was Honora Sneyd. This I do not remember; but I am perfectly sure that, when I did see her, she appeared to me most lovely, even more lovely than when we parted. What her sentiments might be it was impossible to divine. 'My addresses were, after some time, permitted and approved; and, with the consent of her father, Miss Honora Sneyd and I were married (1773), by special licence, in the ladies' choir, in the Cathedral at Lichfield. Immediately after the marriage ceremony we left Lichfield, and went to Ireland.' Now followed what was perhaps the happiest period of Mr. Edgeworth's life, but it was uneventful. The young couple saw little society while living at Edgeworth Town; and after a three years' residence in Ireland, they visited England to rub off the rust of isolation in contact with their intellectual friends. He says: 'We certainly found a considerable change for the better as to comfort, convenience, and conversation among our English acquaintance. So much so, that we were induced to remain in England. . . . My mind was kept up to the current of speculation and discovery in the world of science, and continual hints for reflection and invention were suggested to me. . . . My attention was about this period turned to clockwork, and I invented several pieces of mechanism for measuring time. These, with the assistance of a good workman, I executed successfully. I then (in 1776) finished a clock on a new construction. Its accuracy was tried at the Observatory at Oxford . . . and it is now (in 1809) going well at my house in Ireland.' Edgeworth now enjoyed the pleasure of having an intelligent companion, and says: 'My wife had an eager desire for knowledge of all sorts, and, perhaps to please me, became an excellent theoretic mechanic. Mechanical amusements occupied my mornings, and I dedicated my evenings to the best books upon various subjects. I strenuously endeavoured to improve my own understanding, and to communicate whatever I knew to my wife. Indeed, while we read and conversed together during the long winter evenings, the clearness of her judgment assisted me in every pursuit of literature in which I was engaged; as her understanding had arrived at maturity before she had acquired any strong prejudices on historical subjects, she derived uncommon advantage from books. 'We had frequent visitors from town; and as our acquaintance were people of literature and science, conversation with them exercised and arranged her thoughts upon whatever subject they were employed. Nor did we neglect the education of our children: Honora had under her care, at this time, two children of her own, and three of mine by my former marriage.' Edgeworth and his friend Mr. Day were both great admirers of Rousseau's Emile and of his scheme of bringing up children to be hardy, fearless, and independent. Edgeworth brought up his eldest boy after this fashion; but though he succeeded in making him hardy, and training him in 'all the virtues of a child bred in the hut of a savage, and all the knowledge of things which could well be acquired at an early age by a boy bred in civilised society,' yet he adds: 'He was not disposed to obey; his exertions generally arose from his own will; and, though he was what is commonly called good-tempered and good-natured, though he generally pleased by his looks, demeanour, and conversation, he had too little deference for others, and he showed an invincible dislike to control.' In passing through Paris, Edgeworth and Mr. Day went to see Rousseau, who took a good deal of notice of Edgeworth's son; he judged him to be a boy of abilities, and he thought from his answers that 'history can be advantageously learned by children, if it be taught reasonably and not merely by rote.' 'But,' said Rousseau, 'I remark in your son a propensity to party prejudice, which will be a great blemish in his character.' 'I asked how he could in so short a time form so decided an opinion. He told me that, whenever my son saw a handsome horse, or a handsome carriage in the street, he always exclaimed, "That is an English horse or an English carriage!" And that, even down to a pair of shoe-buckles, everything that appeared to be good of its kind was always pronounced by him to be English. "his sort of party prejudice," said Rousseau, "if suffered to become a ruling motive in his mind, will lead to a thousand evils; for not only will his own country, his own village or club, or even a knot of his private acquaintance, be the object of his exclusive admiration; but he will be governed by his companions, whatever they may be, and they will become the arbiters of destiny."' It was while at Lyons that Edgeworth realised thaf Rousseau's system of education was not altogether satisfactory. He says: 'I had begun his education upon the mistaken principles of Rousseau; and I had pursued them with as much steadiness, and, so far as they could be advantageous, with as much success as I could desire. Whatever regarded the health, strength, and agility of my son had amply justified the system of my master; but I found myself entangled in difficulties with regard to my child's mind and temper. He was generous, brave, good-natured, and what is commonly called goodtempered; but he was scarcely to be controlled. It was difficult to urge him to anything that did not suit his fancy, and more difficult to restrain him from what he wished to follow. In short, he was self-willed, from a spirit of independence, which had been inculcated by his early education, and which he cherished the more from the inexperience of his own powers. 'I must here acknowledge, with deep regret, not only the error of a theory, which I had adopted at a very early age, when older and wiser persons than myself had been dazzled by the eloquence of Rousseau; but I must also reproach myself with not having, after my arrival in France, paid as much attention to my boy as I had done in England, or as much as was necessary to prevent the formation of those habits, which could never afterwards be eradicated.' Edgeworth, finding that the tutor he had brought from England was not able to control his son, resolved to send young Richard to school at Lyons. The Jesuits had lately been dismissed, but the Peres de L'Oratoire had taken charge of their Seminary, and to them Edgeworth resolved to intrust his son, having been first assured by the Superior that he would not attempt to convert the boy, and would forbid the under-masters to do so. A certain Pere Jerome, however, desired to make the boy a good Catholic; and the Superior frankly told Edgeworth the circumstance, saying, 'One day he took your boy between his knees, and began from the beginning of things to teach him what he ought to believe. "My little man," said he, "did you ever hear of God?" '"Yes." '"You know that, before He made the world, His Spirit brooded over the vast deep, which was a great sea without shores, and without bottom. Then He made this world out of earth." '"Where did He find the earth ?" asked the boy. '"At the bottom of the sea," replied Father Jerome. '"But," said the boy, "you told me just now that the sea had no bottom!"' The Superior of the College des Oratoires concluded, 'You may, sir, I think, be secure that your son, when capable of making such a reply, is in no great danger of becoming a Catholic from the lectures of such profound teachers as these.' This son, having no turn for scholarship, ultimately went to sea, a life which his hardihood and fearlessness of danger peculiarly fitted him for. Some years afterwards he married an American lady and settled in South Carolina. It was, perhaps, a failure in this first experiment in education which made Edgeworth devote so much care to the training of his younger children. CHAPTER 4 After six years of happiness Honora's health gave way, and consumption set in; some months of anxious nursing followed before she died, to the great grief of her husband. She left several children, and her dying wish was that he should marry her sister Elizabeth. Mr. Edgeworth was, at first, benumbed by grief, and unable to take an interest in his former pursuits; but in the society of his wife's family he gradually recovered cheerfulness, and began to consider his wife's dying advice to marry her sister. He remarks: 'Nothing is more erroneous than the common belief, that a man who has lived in the greatest happiness with one wife will be the most averse to take another. On the contrary, the loss of happiness, which he feels when he loses her, necessarily urges him to endeavour to be again placed in a situation which has constituted his former felicity. 'I felt that Honora had judged wisely, and from a thorough knowledge of my character, when she had advised me to marry again.' After these observations it is not surprising to hear that Edgeworth became engaged to Elizabeth Sneyd in the autumn of 1780. They were staying for the marriage at Brereton Hall in Cheshire, and their banns were published in the parish church; but on the very morning appointed for the marriage, the clergyman received a letter which roused so many scruples in his mind as to make Edgeworth think it cruel to press him to perform the ceremony. The Rector of St. Andrew's, Holborn, was less scrupulous, and they were married there on Christmas Day 1780. The following summer Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth rented Davenport Hall in Cheshire, where they lived a quiet retired life, spending a good deal of their time with their friends Sir Charles and Lady Holte at Brereton. Edgeworth amused himself by making a clock for the steeple at Brereton, and a chronometer of a singular construction, which, he says,'I intended to present to the King ... to add to His Majesty's collection of uncommon clocks and watches which I had seen at St. James's.' The autobiography from which I have been quoting was begun by Edgeworth when he was about sixty-three, and it breaks off abruptly at the date of 1781. The illness which interrupted his task did not, however, prove fatal, for he lived nearly ten years afterwards. His daughter Maria takes up the narrative, and in her introduction she says, 'In continuing these Memoirs, I shall endeavour to follow the example that my father has set me of simplicity and of truth.' The following memorandum was found in Edgeworth's handwriting: 'In the year 1782 I returned to Ireland, with a firm determination to dedicate the remainder of my life to the improvement of my estate, and to the education of my children; and farther, with the sincere hope of contributing to the amelioration of the inhabitants of the country from which I drew my subsistence.' When in the spring of 1768 Edgeworth visited Ireland with his friend Mr. Day, the latter was surprised and disgusted by the state of Dublin and of the country in general. He found 'the streets of Dublin were wretchedly paved, and more dirty than can be easily imagined.' Edgeworth adds: 'As we passed through the country, the hovels in which the poor were lodged, which were then far more wretched than they are at present, or than they have been for the last twenty years, the black tracts of bog, and the unusual smell of the turf fuel, were to him never-ceasing topics of reproach and lamentation. Mr. Day's deep-seated prejudice in favour of savage life was somewhat shaken by this view of want and misery, which philosophers of a certain class in London and Paris chose at that time to dignify by the name of simplicity. The modes of living in the houses of the gentry were much the same in Ireland as in England. This surprised my friend. He observed, that if there was any difference, it was that people of similar fortune did not restrain themselves equally in both countries to the same prudent economy; but that every gentleman in Ireland, of two or three thousand pounds a year, lived in a certain degree of luxury and show that would be thought presumptuous in persons of the same fortune in England. 'On our journey to my father's house, I had occasion to vote at a contested election in one of the counties through which we passed. Here a scene of noise, riot, confusion, and drunkenness was exhibited, not superior indeed in depravity and folly, but of a character or manner so different from what my friend had even seen in his own country, that he fell into a profound melancholy.' It was to remedy this wretched state of things in Ireland that Edgeworth resolved in 1782 to devote his energies. It is curious to read his account of the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland at this date. He soon learned that firmness was required in his dealings with his tenants as well as kindness. 'He omitted a variety of old feudal remains of fines and penalties; but there was one clause, which he continued in every lease with a penalty attached to it, called an alienation fine--a fine of so much an acre upon the tenant's reletting any part of the devised land.' He wisely resolved to receive his rents himself, and to avoid the intervention of any agent or driver ('a person who drives and impounds cattle for rent or arrears'). 'In every case where the tenant had improved the land, or even where he had been industrious, though unsuccessful, his claim to preference over every new proposer, his tenanfs right, as it is called, was admitted. But the mere plea of "I have lived under your Honour, or your Honour's father or grandfather" or "I have been on your Honour's estate so many years" he disregarded. Farms, originally sufficient for the comfortable maintenance of a man, his wife, and family, had in many cases been subdivided from generation to generation, the father giving a bit of the land to each son to settle him. It was an absolute impossibility that the land should ever be improved if let in these miserable lots. Nor was it necessary that each son should hold land, or advantageous that each should live on his "little potato garden" without further exertion of mind or body. 'There was a continual struggle between landlord and tenant upon the question of long and short leases. . . . The offer of immediate high rent, or of fines to be paid down directly, tempted the landlord's extravagance, or supplied his present necessities, at the expense of his future interests. . . . Many have let for ninety-nine years; and others, according to a form common in 'Ireland, for three lives, renewable for ever, paying a small fine on the insertion of a new life at the failure of each. These leases, in course of years, have been found extremely disadvantageous to the landlord, the property having risen so much in value that the original rent was absurdly disproportioned. 'The longest term my father ever gave,' says his daughter Maria, 'was thirty-one years, with one or sometimes two lives. He usually gave one life, reserving to himself the option of adding another --the son, perhaps, of the tenant--if he saw that the tenant deserved it by his conduct. This sort of power to encourage and reward in the hands of a landlord is advantageous in Ireland. It acts as a motive for exertion; it keeps up the connection and dependence which there ought to be between the different ranks, without creating any servile habits, or leaving the improving tenant insecure as to the fair reward of his industry. 'Edgeworth's plan was to take not that which, abstractedly viewed, is the best possible course, but that which is the best the circumstances will altogether allow. 'When the oppressive duty-work in Ireland was no longer claimed, and no longer inserted in Irish leases, there arose a difficulty to gentlemen in getting labourers at certain times of the year, when all are anxious to work for themselves; for instance, at the seasons for cutting turf, setting potatoes, and getting home the harvest. 'To provide against this difficulty, landlords adopted a system of taking duty-work, in fact, in a new form. They had cottiers (cottagers), day-labourers established in cottages, on their estate, usually near their own residence. Many of these cabins were the poorest habitations that can be imagined; and these were given rent free, that is, the rent was to be worked out on whatever days, or on whatever occasions, it was called for. The grazing for the cow, the patch of land for flax, and the ridge or ridges of potato land were also to be paid for in days' labour in the same manner. The uncertainty of this tenure at will, that is, at the pleasure of the landlord, with the rent in labour and time, variable also at his pleasure or convenience, became rather more injurious to the tenant than the former fixed mode of sacrificing so many days' duty-work, even at the most hazardous seasons of the year. 'My father wished to have entirely avoided this cottager system; but he was obliged to adopt a middle course. To his labourers he gave comfortable cottages at a low rent, to be held at will from year to year; but he paid them wages exactly the same as what they could obtain elsewhere. Thus they were partly free and partly bound. They worked as free labourers; but they were obliged to work, that they might pay their rent. And their houses being better, and other advantages greater, than they could obtain elsewhere, they had a motive for industry and punctuality; thus their services and their attachment were properly secured. . . . My father's indulgence as to the time he allowed his tenantry for the payment of their rent was unusually great. He left always a year's rent in their hands: this was half a year more time than almost any other gentleman in our part of the country allowed. . . . He was always very exact in requiring that the rents should not, in their payments, pass beyond the half-yearly days--the 25th of March and 29th of September. In this point they knew his strictness so well that they seldom ventured to go into arrear, and never did so with impunity. . . . They would have cheated, loved, and despised a more easy landlord, and his property would have gone to ruin, without either permanently bettering their interests or their morals. He, therefore, took especial care that they should be convinced of his strictness in punishing as well as of his desire to reward. 'Where the offender was tenant, and the punisher landlord, it rarely happened, even if the law reached the delinquent, that public opinion sided with public justice. In Ireland it has been, time immemorial, common with tenants, who have had advantageous bargains, and who have no hopes of getting their leases renewed, to waste the ground as much as possible; to break it up towards the end of the term; or to overhold, that is, to keep possession of the land, refusing to deliver it up. 'A tenant, who held a farm of considerable value, when his lease was out, besought my father to permit him to remain on the farm for another year, pleading that he had no other place to which he could, at that season, it being winter, remove his large family. The permission was granted; but at the end of the year, taking advantage of this favour, he refused to give up the land. Proceedings at law were immediately commenced against him; and it was in this case that the first trial in Ireland was brought, on an act for recovering double rent from a tenant for holding forcible possession after notice to quit. 'This vexatious and unjust practice of tenants against landlords had been too common, and had too long been favoured by the party spirit of juries; who, being chiefly composed of tenants, had made it a common cause, and a principle, if it could in any way be avoided, never to give a verdict, as they said, against themselves. But in this case the indulgent character of the landlord, combined with the ability and eloquence of his advocate, succeeded in moving the jury--a verdict was obtained for the landlord. The double rent was paid; and the fraudulent tenant was obliged to quit the country unpitied. Real good was done by this example.' Edgeworth objected strongly to a practice common among the gentry, 'to protect their tenants when they got into any difficulties by disobeying the laws. Smuggling and illicit distilling seemed to be privileged cases, where, the justice and expediency of the spirit of the law being doubtful, escaping from the letter of it appeared but a trial of ingenuity or luck. In cases that admitted of less doubt, in the frequent breach of the peace from quarrels at fairs, rescuing of cattle drivers for rent, or in other more serious outrages, tenants still looked to their landlord for protection; and hoped, even to the last, that his Honour's or his Lordship's interest would get the fine taken off, the term of imprisonment shortened, or the condemned criminal snatched from execution. He [Edgeworth] never would, on any occasion, or for the persons he was known to like best, interfere to protect, as it is called, that is, to screen, or to obtain pardon for any one of his tenants or dependants, if they had really infringed the laws, or had deserved punishment. . . . He set an example of being scrupulous to the most exact degree as a grand juror, both as to the money required for roads or for any public works, and as to the manner in which it was laid out. 'To his character as a good landlord was soon added that he was a real gentleman. This phrase, pronounced with well-known emphasis, comprises a great deal in the opinion of the lower Irish. They seem to have an instinct for the real gentleman, whom they distinguish, if not at first sight, infallibly at first hearing, from every pretender to the character. They observe that the real gentleman bears himself most kindly, is always the most civil in speech, and ever seems the most tender of the poor. . . . 'They soon began to rely upon his justice as a magistrate. This is a point where, their interest being nearly concerned, they are wonderfully quick and clearsighted; they soon discovered that Mr. Edgeworth leaned neither to Protestant nor Catholic, to Presbyterian nor Methodist; that he was not the favourer nor partial protector of his own or any other man's followers. They found that the law of the land was not in his hands an instrument of oppression, or pretence for partiality. They discerned that he did even justice; neither inclining to the people, for the sake of popularity; nor to the aristocracy, for the sake of power. This was a thing so unusual, that they could at first hardly believe that it was really what they saw. 'Soon after his return to Ireland he set about improving a considerable tract of land, reletting it at an advanced rent, which gave the actual monied measure of his skill and success.' He also wrote a paper on the draining and planting of bogs, in which he gives minute directions for carrying out the work, for he was no mere theorist, but experimented on his own property; and he was not ashamed to own when he had made a mistake, but was constantly learning from experience. He had for a while to turn from peaceful occupations and take his share in patriotic efforts for parliamentary reform; this reform was pressed on the parliament sitting in Dublin by a delegation from a convention of the Irish volunteers. They were raised in 1778 during the American War, when England had not enough troops for the defence of Ireland. The principal Irish nobility and gentry enrolled themselves, and the force at length increased, till it numbered 50,000 men, under the command of officers of their own choosing. The Irish patriots now felt their power, and used it with prudence and energy. They obtained the repeal of many noxious laws--one in particular was a penal statute passed in the reign of William III. against the Catholics ordaining forfeiture of inheritance against those Catholics who had been educated abroad.' At the pleasure of any informer, it confiscated their estates to the next Protestant heir; that statute further deprived Papists of the power of obtaining any legal property by purchase; and, simply for officiating in the service of his religion, any Catholic priest was liable to be imprisoned for life. Some of these penalties had fallen into disuse; but, as Mr. Dunning stated to the English House of Commons, "many respectable Catholics still lived in fear of them, and some actually paid contributions to persons who, on the strength of this act, threatened them with prosecutions." Lord Shelburne stated in the House of Lords "that even the most odious part of this statute had been recently acted upon in the case of one Moloury, an Irish priest, who had been informed against, apprehended, convicted, and committed to prison, by means of the lowest and most despicable of mankind, a common informing constable. The Privy Council used efforts in behalf of the prisoner; but, in consequence of the written law, the King himself could not give a pardon, and the prisoner must have died in jail if Lord Shelburne and his colleagues had not released him at their own risk."' This law was repealed by the English House of Commons without a negative, and only one Bishop opposed its repeal in the House of Lords. Having won this victory, the Irish patriots continued their campaign, and now sought to win general emancipation from the legislative and commercial restrictions of England. It was in 1781 that the first convention of volunteer delegates met, and some months after Mr. Grattan moved an address to the throne asserting the legislative independence of Ireland. 'The address passed; the repeal of a certain act, empowering England to legislate for Ireland, followed; and the legislative independence of this country was acknowledged.' Edgeworth sympathised with the enthusiasm which prevailed throughout Ireland at this time; but he was shrewd enough to see that what was further required for the real benefit of the country was 'an effectual reformation of the Irish House of Commons.' The counties were insufficiently represented, and the boroughs were venal. The Irish parliament was, in fact, an Oligarchy, and Edgeworth realised this danger. He, however, wished the reform to be carried on 'through the intervention of parliament,' while the more extreme party insisted on sending delegates from the volunteers to a convention in Dublin. This military convention 'met at the Royal Exchange in Dublin, November the 9th, 1783--Parliament was then sitting. An armed convention assembled in the capital, and sitting at the same time with the Houses of Lords and Commons, deliberating on a legislative question, was a new and unprecedented spectacle. 'In this convention, as in all public assemblies, there was a violent and a moderate party. Lord Charlemont, the president of the assembly, was at the head of the moderate men. Though not convinced of the strict legality of the meeting, he thought a reform in parliament so important and desirable an object, that to the probability or chance of obtaining this great advantage it was the wisdom of a true patriot to sacrifice punctilio, and to hazard all, but, what he was too wise and good to endanger, the peace of the country. Lord Charlemont accepted the office of president, specially with the hope that he and his friends might be able to influence the convention in favour of proceedings at once temperate and firm. The very sincerity of his desire to attain a reform rendered him clear-sighted as to the means to be pursued; and while he wished that the people should be allowed every degree of liberty consistent with safety, no man was less inclined to democracy, or could feel more horror at the idea of involving his country in a state of civil anarchy. 'The Bishop of Deny (Lord Bristol), wishing well to Ireland, but of a far less judicious character than Lord Charlemont, was at the head of the opposite party. . . . Lord Charlemont, foreseeing the danger of disagreement between the parliament and convention, if at this time any communication were opened between them, earnestly deprecated the attempts. It was his desire that the convention, after declaring their opinion in favour of a parliamentary reform, should adjourn without adopting a specific plan; and that they should refer it to future meetings of each county, to send to parliament, in the regular constitutional manner, their petitions and addresses. Mr. Flood, however, whose abilities and eloquence had predominant influence over the convention, and who wished to distinguish himself in parliament as the proposer of reform, prevailed upon the convention, on one of the last nights of their meeting, to send him, accompanied by other members of parliament from among the volunteer delegates, directly to the House of Commons then sitting. There he was to make a motion on the question of parliamentary reform, introducing to the House his specific plan from the convention. The appearance of Mr. Flood, and of the delegates by whom he was accompanied, in their volunteer uniforms, in the Irish House of Commons, excited an extraordinary sensation. Those who were present, and who have given an account of the scene that ensued, describe it as violent and tumultuous in the extreme. On both sides the passions were worked up to a dangerous height. The debate lasted all night. "The tempest, for, towards morning, debate there was none, at last ceased." The question was put, and Mr. Flood's motion for reform in parliament was negatived by a very large majority. The House of Commons then entered into resolutions declaratory of their fixed determination to maintain their just rights and privileges against any encroachments whatever, adding that it was at that time indispensably necessary to make such a declaration. Further, an address was moved, intended to be made the joint address of Lords and Commons to the throne, expressing their satisfaction with His Majesty's Government, and their resolution to support that government, and the constitution, with their lives and fortunes. The address was carried up to the Lords, and immediately agreed to. This was done with the celerity of passion on all sides. 'Meantime an armed convention continued sitting the whole night, waiting for the return of their delegates from the House of Commons, and impatient to learn the fate of Mr. Flood's motion. One step more, and irreparable, fatal imprudence might have been committed. Lord Charlemont, the president of the convention, felt the danger; and it required all the influence of his character, all the assistance of the friends of moderation, to prevail upon the assembly to dissolve, without waiting longer to hear the report from their delegates in the House of Commons. The convention had, in fact, nothing more to do, or nothing that they could attempt without peril; but it was difficult to persuade the assembly to dissolve the meeting, and to return quietly to their respective counties and homes. This point, however, was fortunately accomplished, and early in the morning the meeting terminated.' Miss Edgeworth adds: 'I have heard my father say that he ever afterwards rejoiced in the share he had in preserving one of the chiefs of this volunteer convention from a desperate resolution, and in determining the assembly to a temperate termination.' Writing of this convention many years afterwards, Edgeworth says: 'There never was any assembly in the British empire more in earnest in the business on which they were convened, or less influenced by courtly interference or cabal. But the object was in itself unattainable. 'The idea of admitting Roman Catholics to the right of voting for representatives was not urged even by the most liberal and most enlightened members of the convention; and the number, and wealth, and knowledge of Protestant voters in Ireland could not decently be considered as sufficient to elect an adequate and fair representation of the people.' The reforms were never carried, though fresh efforts, equally unsuccessful, were made when Pitt became minister. CHAPTER 5 It was in 1786 that Edgeworth had a severe fall from a scaffolding, the result of which was, as his friend Dr Darwin prophesied, an attack of jaundice. When the workmen brought him home, he tried to reassure his family by telling them the story of a French Marquis,' who fell from a balcony at Versailles, and who, as it was court politeness that nothing unfortunate should ever be mentioned in the King's presence, replied to His Majesty's inquiry if he wasn't hurt by his fall, "Tout au contraire, Sire"' To all our inquiries whether he was hurt, my father replied, 'Tout au contraire, mes aimes.' His friendship for Mr. Day, which had existed for many years, was now interrupted by Mr. Day's sudden death from a fall from his horse in 1789. Edgeworth thought of writing his life, as he considered him to have been a man of such original and noble character as to deserve a public eulogium. He goes on to say: 'To preserve a portrait to posterity, it must either be the likeness of some celebrated individual, or it must represent a face which, independently of peculiar associations, corresponds with the universal ideas of beauty. So the pen of the biographer should portray only those who by their public have interested us in their private characters; or who, in a superior degree, have possessed the virtues and mental endowments which claim the general love and admiration of mankind.' This biography, however, was never finished, as Edgeworth found another friend, Mr. Keir, had undertaken it; he therefore sent the materials to him, but some of them are incorporated in the Memoirs, Sabrina, whom Mr. Day had educated, and intended to marry (though he gave up the idea when he doubted her docility and power of adaptiveness to his strange theories of life), ultimately married his friend, Mr. Bicknel, while Mr. Day married Miss Milne, a clever and accomplished lady, who had sufficient tact to fall in with his wishes, and a wifely devotion which made up to her for their seclusion from general society. In her widowhood she found Mr. Edgeworth a most faithful and helpful friend; he offered to come over and aid in the search which was made at Mr. Day's death for a large sum of money which was not forthcoming, and which it was thought he might, after his eccentric fashion, have concealed; as he took this measure when, 'at the time of the American War, he had apprehended that there would have been a national bankruptcy, and under this dread he had sold out of the Stocks. ... A very considerable sum had been buried under the floor of the study in his mother's house. This he afterwards took up, and placed again in the public funds at the return of peace.' Mr. Day had, before his marriage, promised to leave his library to his friend Edgeworth, but no mention was made of this in the will; he left almost everything to Mrs. Day. She, however, hearing of Mr. Day's promise, offered his library to his friend; but Edgeworth, in the same generous spirit, refused it, and Mrs. Day then wrote to him as follows: 'MY DEAR MR. EDGEWORTH,--I will ingenuously own, that of all the bequests Mr. Day could have made, the leaving his whole library from me would have mortified me the most--indeed, more than if he had disposed of all his other property, and left me only that. My ideas of him are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be, as it were, breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me. Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am persuaded they are not so to you.' Maria Edgeworth adds: 'Generous people understand each other. Mrs Day, of a noble disposition herself, always distinguished in my father the same generosity of disposition. She had, she said, ever considered him as "the most purely disinterested and proudly independent of Mr. Day's friends."' Edgeworth was a devoted father; and the loss of his daughter Honora, a gifted girl of fifteen, was a great blow to him. She was the child of his beloved wife Honora, and he had taken great pleasure in guiding her studies and watching the development of her character. Ever since he had settled in his Irish home one of Edgeworth's chief interests had been the education of his large family; Maria records with pride that at the age of seven Honora was able to answer the following questions: 'If a line move its own length through the air so as to produce a surface, what figure will it describe?' She answered, 'A square! She was then asked: 'If that square be moved downwards or upwards in the air the space of the length of one of its own sides, what figure will it, at the end of its motion, have described in the air?' After a few minutes' silence she answered, 'A cube.' Edgeworth was careful to train not only the reasoning powers, but also the imaginative faculty of his children; he delighted in good poetry and fiction, and read aloud well, and his daughter writes: 'From the Arabian Tales to Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and the Greek tragedians, all were associated in the minds of his children with the delight of hearing passages from them first read by their father.' He was an enthusiastic admirer of the ancient classics--Homer and the Greek tragedians in particular. From the best translations of the ancient tragedies he selected for reading aloud the most striking passages, and Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' he read several times to his family, in certain portions every day. In his grief for his child, Edgeworth turned to his earliest friend, his sister, the favourite companion of his childhood, and from her he received all the consolation that affectionate sympathy could give; but, as he said, 'for real grief there is no sudden cure; all human resource is in time and occupation.' It was about this time that Darwin published the now forgotten poem, 'The Botanic Garden,' and Edgeworth wrote to his friend expressing his admiration for it; but Maria adds: 'With as much sincerity as he gave praise, my father blamed and opposed whatever he thought was faulty in his friend's poem. Dr. Darwin had formed a false theory, that poetry is painting to the eye; this led him to confine his attention to the language of description, or to the representation of that which would produce good effect in picture. To this one mistaken opinion he sacrificed the more lasting and more extensive fame, which he might have ensured by exercising the powers he possessed of rousing the passions and pleasing the imagination. 'When my father found that it was in vain to combat a favourite false principle, he endeavoured to find a subject which should at once suit his friend's theory and his genius. He urged him to write a "Cabinet of Gems." The ancient gems would have afforded a subject eminently suited to his descriptive powers. . . . The description of Medea, and of some of the labours of Hercules, etc., which he has introduced into his "Botanic Garden," show how admirably he would have succeeded had he pursued this plan; and I cannot help regretting that the suggestions of his friend could not prevail upon him to quit for nobler objects his vegetable loves.' Edgeworth's prediction has not yet come true, nor does it seem likely that it ever will, 'that in future times some critic will arise, who shall re-discover the "Botanic Garden,"' and build his fame upon this discovery. Dr. Darwin did not follow his friend's advice, to choose a better subject for his next poem; nor did Edgeworth do what his friend wished, which was to publish a decade of inventions with neat maps. In the education of his children, he had already learned the value of the observation of children's ways and mental states. Having found that Rousseau's system was imperfect, he was groping after some better method. His daughter writes: 'Long before he ever thought of writing or publishing, he had kept a register of observations and facts relative to his children. This he began in the year 1798. He and Mrs. Honora Edgeworth kept notes of every circumstance which occurred worth recording. Afterwards Mrs Elizabeth Edgeworth and he continued the same practice; and in consequence of his earnest exhortations, I began in 1791 or 1792 to note down anecdotes of the children whom he was then educating. Besides these, I often wrote for my own amusement and instruction some of his conversation-lessons, as we may call them, with his questions and explanations, and the answers of the children. . . . To all who ever reflected upon education it must have occurred that facts and experiments were wanting in this department of knowledge, while assertions and theories abounded. I claim for my father the merit of having been the first to recommend, both by example and precept, what Bacon would call the experimental method in education. If I were obliged to rest on any single point my father's credit as a lover of truth, and his utility as a philanthropist and as a philosophical writer, it should be on his having made this first record of experiments in education. ... In noting anecdotes of children, the greatest care must be taken that the pupils should not know that any such register is kept. Want of care in this particular would totally defeat the object in view, and would lead to many and irremediable bad consequences, and would make the children affected and false, or would create a degree of embarrassment and constraint which must prevent the natural action of the understanding or the feelings. ... In the registry of such observations, considered as contributing to a history of the human mind, nothing should be neglected as trivial. The circumstances which may seem most trifling to vulgar observers may be most valuable to the philosopher; they may throw light, for example, on the manner in which ideas and language are formed and generalised.' Edgeworth and his daughter Maria brought out their joint work, Practical Education, in 1798. Maria adds: 'So commenced that literary partnership, which for so many years was the pride and joy of my life.' We who were born in the first half of the nineteenth century can remember the delight of reading about Frank and Rosamund, and Harry and Lucy, and feel a debt of gratitude to the writers who gave us so many pleasant hours. Edgeworth's patience in teaching was surprising, as Maria remarks, in a man of his vivacity. 'He would sit quietly while a child was thinking of the answer to a question without interrupting, or suffering it to be interrupted, and would let the pupil touch and quit the point repeatedly; and without a leading observation or exclamation, he would wait till the steps of reasoning and invention were gone through, and were converted into certainties. . . . The tranquillising effect of this patience was of great advantage. The pupil's mind became secure, not only of the point in question, but steady in the confidence of its future powers. It was his principle to excite the attention fully and strongly for a short time, and never to go to the point of fatigue. ... In the education of the heart, his warmth of approbation and strength of indignation had powerful and salutary influence in touching and developing the affections. The scorn in his countenance when he heard of any base conduct; the pleasure that lighted up his eyes when he heard of any generous action; the eloquence of his language, and vehemence of his emphasis, commanded the sympathy of all who could see, hear, feel, or understand. Added to the power of every moral or religious motive, sympathy with the virtuous enthusiasm of those we love and reverence produces a great and salutary effect. 'It often happens that a preceptor appears to have a great influence for a time, and that this power suddenly dissolves. This is, and must be the case, wherever any sort of deception has been used. My father never used any artifice of this kind, and consequently he always possessed that confidence, which is the reward of plain dealing--a confidence which increases in the pupil's mind with age, knowledge, and experience.' The readers of the second part of 'Harry and Lucy' will remember the driving tour through England, which they took with their parents, who were careful to point out to them all that was of interest, and to rouse their powers of observation. And in the same manner Edgeworth, 'at the time when he was building or carrying on experiments, or work of any sort, constantly explained to his children whatever was done, and by his questions, adapted to their several ages and capacities, exercised their powers of observation, reasoning, and invention. 'It often happened that trivial circumstances, by which the curiosity of the children had been excited, or experiments obvious to the senses, by which they had been interested, led afterwards to deeper reflection or to philosophical inquiries, suited to others in the family of more advanced age and knowledge. The animation spread through the house by connecting children with all that is going on, and allowing them to join in thought or conversation with the grown-up people of the family, was highly useful, and thus both sympathy and emulation excited mental exertion in the most agreeable manner.' In 1794 he wrote of his son Lovell: 'He has been employed in building and other active pursuits, which seldom fall to the share of young men, but which seem as agreeable to him as the occupations of a mail-coachman, a groom, or a stable-boy are to some youths. I am every day more convinced of the advantages of good education.' He adds: 'One of my younger boys is what is called a genius--that is to say, he has vivacity, attention, and good organs. I do not think one tear per month is shed in the house, nor the voice of reproof heard, nor the hand of restraint felt. To educate a second race costs no trouble. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute! The result of this watchful and tender interest in his children's education may be judged by a passage in the later part of the Memoirs, where his daughter says: 'When I was writing this page (July 1818), this brother was with me; and when I stopped to make some inquiry from him as to his recollection of that period of his life, he reminded me of many circumstances of my father's kindness to him, and brought to me letters written on his first entrance into the world, highly characteristic of the warmth of my father's affections, and of the strength of his mind. . . . The conviction is full and strong on my own mind, that a father's confiding kindness, and plain sincerity to a young man, when he first sets out in the world, make an impression the most salutary and indelible. When his sons first quitted the paternal roof, they were all completely at liberty; he never took any indirect means to watch over or to influence them; he treated them on all occasions with entire openness and confidence. In their tastes and pursuits, joys and sorrows, they were sure of their father's sympathy; in all difficulties or disappointments, they applied to him, as their best friend, for counsel, consolation, or support; and the delight that he took in any exertion of their talents, or in any instance of their honourable conduct, they felt as a constant generous excitement.' Edgeworth had no ambition on his own account to be an author; but his wish to supply wholesome literature for the young led him into writing, conjointly with his daughter, several books. Besides these was one which had a different object, in the Essay on Irish Bulls he 'wished' (his daughter writes) 'to show the English public the eloquence, wit, and talents of the lower classes of people in Ireland. . . . He excelled in imitating the Irish, because he never overstepped the modesty or the assurance of nature. He marked exquisitely the happy confidence, the shrewd wit of the people, without condescending to produce effect by caricature. He knew not only their comic talents, but their powers of pathos; and often when he had just heard from them some pathetic complaint, he has repeated it to me while the impression was fresh. In the chapter on Wit and Eloquence in Irish Bulls, there is a speech of a poor freeholder to a candidate, who asked for his vote; this speech was made to my father when he was canvassing the county of Longford. It was repeated to me a few hours afterwards, and I wrote it down instantly, without, I believe, the variation of a word. 'In the same chapter there is the complaint of a poor widow against her landlord, and the landlord's reply in his own defence. This passage was quoted, I am told, by Campbell in one of his celebrated lectures on Eloquence. It was supposed by him to have been a quotation from a fictitious narrative, but, on the contrary, it is an unembellished fact. My father was the magistrate before whom the widow and her landlord appeared, and made that complaint and defence, which he repeated, and I may say acted, for me. The speeches I instantly wrote word for word, and the whole was described exactly from the life of his representation.' Edgeworth was anxious that his children should have no unpleasant associations with their first steps in reading; he therefore took great pains to find out the easiest way of teaching them to read, and wrote for this purpose A Rational Primer. Maria adds: 'Nothing but the true desire to be useful could have induced any man of talents to choose such inglorious labours; but he thought no labour, however humble, beneath him, if it promised improvement in education. . . . His principle of always giving distinct marks for each different sound of the vowels has been since brought into more general use. It forms the foundation of Pestalozzi's plan of teaching to read. But one of the most useful of the marks in the Rational Primer, the mark of obliteration, designed to show what letters are to be omitted in pronouncing words, has not, I believe, been adopted by any public instructor.' Among the calls on Edgeworth's time about 1790 was the management of the embarrassed affairs of a relation; he had some difficulties with the creditors, but in trying to collect arrears of rent he found himself not only in difficulty, but in actual peril. There existed in Ireland at this time a class of persons calling themselves gentlemen tenants--the worst tenants in the world --middlemen, who relet the lands, and live upon the produce, not only in idleness, but in insolent idleness. This kind of half gentry, or mock gentry, seemed to consider it as the most indisputable privilege of a gentleman not to pay his debts. They were ever ready to meet civil law with military brag of war. Whenever a swaggering debtor of this species was pressed for payment, he began by protesting or confessing that 'he considered himself used in an ungentlemanlike manner;' and ended by offering to give, instead of the value of his bond or promise, 'the satisfaction of a gentleman, at any hour or place. . . . My father,' says Maria, 'has often since rejoiced in the recollection of his steadiness at this period of his life. As far as the example of an individual could go, it was of service in his neighbourhood. It showed that such lawless proceedings as he had opposed could be effectually resisted; and it discountenanced that braggadocio style of doing business which was once in Ireland too much in fashion.' CHAPTER 6 It was in 1792 that Edgeworth left Ireland, and he and his family spent nearly two years at Clifton for the health of one of his sons. Maria writes: 'This was the first time I had ever been with him in what is called the world; where he was not only a useful, but a most entertaining guide and companion. His observations upon characters, as they revealed themselves by slight circumstances, were amusing and just. He was a good judge of manners, and of all that related to appearance, both in men and women. Believing, as he did, that young people, from sympathy, imitate or catch involuntarily the habits and tone of the company they keep, he thought it of essential consequence that on their entrance into the world they should see the best models. "No company or good company," was his maxim. By good he did not mean fine. Airs and conceit he despised, as much as he disliked vulgarity. Affectation was under awe before him from an instinctive perception of his powers of ridicule. He could not endure, in favour of any pretensions of birth, fortune, or fashion, the stupidity of a formal circle, or the inanity of commonplace conversation. . .. Sometimes, perhaps, he went too far, and at this period of his life was too fastidious in his choice of society; or when he did go into mixed company, if he happened to be suddenly struck with any extravagance or meanness of fashion, he would inveigh against these with such vehemence as gave a false idea of his disposition. His auditors . . . were provoked to find that one, who could please in any company, should disdain theirs; and that he, who seemed made for society, should prefer living shut up with his own friends and family. An inconvenience arose from this, which is of more consequence than the mere loss of popularity, that he was not always known or understood by those who were really worthy of his acquaintance and regard.' His daughter says later: 'The whole style and tone of society (in Ireland) are altered.--The fashion has passed away of those desperately long, formal dinners, which were given two or three times a year by each family in the country to their neighbours, where the company had more than they could eat, and twenty times more than they should drink; where the gentlemen could talk only of claret, horses, or dogs; and the ladies, only of dress or scandal; so that in the long hours, when they were left to their own discretion, after having examined and appraised each other's finery, many an absent neighbour's character was torn to pieces, merely for want of something to say or to do in the stupid circle. But now the dreadful circle is no more; the chairs, which formerly could only take that form, at which the firmest nerves must ever tremble, are allowed to stand, or turn in any way which may suit the convenience and pleasure of conversation. The gentlemen and ladies are not separated from the time dinner ends till the midnight hour, when the carriages come to the door to carry off the bodies of the dead (drunk). 'A taste for reading and literary conversation has been universally acquired and diffused. Literature has become, as my father long ago prophesied that it would become, fashionable; so that it is really necessary to all, who would appear to advantage, even in the society of their country neighbours.' Referring to her father's conversational powers, Maria adds: 'His style in speaking and writing were as different as it is possible to conceive. In writing, cool and careful, as if on his guard against his natural liveliness of imagination; he was so cautious to avoid exaggeration, that he sometimes repressed enthusiasm. The character of his writings, if I mistake not, is good sense; the characteristic of his conversation was genius and vivacity--one moment playing on the surface, the next diving to the bottom of the subject. When anything touched his feelings, exciting either admiration or indignation, he poured forth enthusiastic eloquence, and then changed quickly to reasoning or wit. His transitions from one thought and feeling, or from one subject and tone to another, were so frequent and rapid, as to surprise, and sometimes to bewilder persons of slow intellect; but always to entertain and delight those of quick capacity. . . . 'His openness in conversation went too far, almost to imprudence, exposing him not only to be misrepresented, but to be misunderstood. . . . Whenever he perceived in any of his friends, or in one of his children, an error of mind, or fault of character, dangerous to their happiness; or when he saw good opportunity of doing them service, by apposite and strong remark or eloquent appeal in conversation, he pursued his object with all the boldness of truth, and with all the warmth of affection. . . . 'I will not deny, what I have heard from some whose truth and sense I cannot question, that his manner, somewhat unusual, of drawing people out, however kindly intended, often abashed the timid, and alarmed the cautious; but, in the judgments to be formed of the understandings of all with whom he conversed, he was uncommonly indulgent. He allowed for the prejudices or for the deficiencies of education; and he foresaw, with the prophetic eye of benevolence, what the understanding or character might become if certain improvements were effected. In discerning genius or abilities of any kind, his penetration was so quick and just that it seemed as if he possessed some mental divining rod revealing to him hidden veins of talent, and giving him the power of discovering mines of intellectual wealth, which lay unsuspected even by the possessor. 'To young persons his manner was most kind and encouraging. I have been gratified by the assurance that many have owed to the instruction and encouragement received from him in casual conversation their first hopes of themselves, their resolution to improve, and a happy change in the colour and fortune of their future lives. . . . Time mellowed but did not impair his vivacity; so that seeming less connected with high animal spirits, it acquired more the character of intellectual energy. Still in age, as in youth, he never needed the stimulus of convivial company, or of new auditors; his spirits and conversation were always more delightful in his own family and in everyday life than in company, even the most literary or distinguished.' The relations between Edgeworth and his daughter Maria were peculiarly close, and she gratefully acknowledges how much she owed to his suggestions and criticisms. He did not share his friend Mr. Day's objections to literary ladies, and was a great admirer of Mrs. Barbauld's writings: 'Ever the true friend and champion of female literature, and zealous for the honour of the female sex, he rejoiced with all the enthusiasm of a warm heart when he found, as he now did, female genius guided by feminine discretion. He exulted in every instance of literary celebrity, supported by the amiable and respectable virtues of private life; proving by example that the cultivation of female talents does not unfit women for their domestic duties and situation in society.' When Maria began to write she always told her father her rough plan, and he, 'with the instinct of a good critic, used to fix immediately upon that which would best answer the purpose.--"Sketch that and show it to me!"--These words' (she adds), 'from the experience of his sagacity, never failed to inspire me with hopes of success. It was then sketched. Sometimes, when I was fond of a particular part, I use to dilate on it in the sketch; but to this he always objected --"I don't want any of your painting--none of your drapery!--I can imagine all that--let me see the bare skeleton." . . . 'After a sketch had his approbation, he would not see the filling it up till it had been worked upon for a week or a fortnight, or till the first thirty or forty pages were written; then they were read to him; and if he thought them going on tolerably well, the pleasure in his eyes, the approving sound of his voice, even without the praise he so warmly bestowed, were sufficient and delightful excitements to "go on and finish." When he thought that there was spirit in what was written, but that it required, as it often did, great correction, he would say, "Leave that to me; it is my business to cut and correct--yours to write on." His skill in cutting, his decision in criticism, was peculiarly useful to me. His ready invention and infinite resource, when I had run myself into difficulties or absurdities, never failed to extricate me at my utmost need. . . . 'Independently of all the advantages, which I as an individual received from my father's constant course of literary instruction, this was of considerable utility in another and less selfish point of view. My father called upon all the family to hear and judge of all we were writing. The taste for literature, and for judging of literary composition, was by this means formed and exercised in a large family, including a succession of nine or ten children, who grew up during the course of these twenty-five years. Stories of children exercised the judgment of children, and so on in proportion to their respective ages, all giving their opinions, and trying their powers of criticism fearlessly and freely. . . . 'He would sometimes advise me to lay by what was done for several months, and turn my mind to something else, that we might look back at it afterwards with fresh eyes. . . . 'I may mention, because it leads to a general principle of criticism, that, in many cases, the attempt to join truth and fiction did not succeed: for instance, Mr. Day's educating Sabrina for his wife suggested the story of Virginia and Clarence Hervey in "Belinda." But to avoid representing the real character of Mr. Day, which I did not think it right to draw, I used the incident with fictitious characters, which I made as unlike the real persons as I possibly could. My father observed to me afterwards that, in this and other instances, the very circumstances that were taken from real life are those that have been objected to as improbable or impossible; for this, as he showed me, there are good and sufficient reasons. In the first place, anxiety to avoid drawing the characters that were to be blameable or ridiculous from any individuals in real life, led me to apply whatever circumstances were taken from reality to characters quite different from those to whom the facts had occurred; and consequently, when so applied, they were unsuitable and improbable: besides, as my father remarked the circumstances which in real life fix the attention, because they are out of the common course of events, are for this very reason unfit for the moral purposes, as well as for the dramatic effect of fiction. The interest we take in hearing an uncommon fact often depends on our belief in its truth. Introduce it into fiction, and this interest ceases, the reader stops to question the truth or probability of the narrative, the illusion and the dramatic effect are destroyed; and as to the moral, no safe conclusion for conduct can be drawn from any circumstances which have not frequently happened, and which are not likely often to recur. In proportion as events are extraordinary, they are useless or unsafe as foundations for prudential reasoning. 'Besides all this, there are usually some small concurrent circumstances connected with extraordinary facts, which we like and admit as evidences of the truth, but which the rules of composition and taste forbid the introducing into fiction; so that the writer is reduced to the difficulty either of omitting the evidence on which the belief of reality rests, or of introducing what may be contrary to good taste, incongruous, out of proportion to the rest of the story, delaying its progress or destructive of its unity. In short, it is dangerous to put a patch of truth into a fiction, for the truth is too strong for the fiction, and on all sides pulls it asunder.' To live with Edgeworth must have been to enjoy a constant mental stimulus; he could not bear his companions to use words without attaching ideas to them; he did not want talk to consist of a fluent utterance of second-hand thoughts, but always encouraged the expression of genuine opinion. To show how willing Edgeworth was to help a child in understanding a word which was new to it, I will quote from one of his letters to Maria: 'Give my love to little F, and tell her that I had not time to explain a section to her. I therefore beg that, with as little explanation as possible, you will bisect a lemon before her, and point out the appearance of the rind, of the cavities, and seeds; and afterwards, at your leisure, get a small cylinder of wood turned for her, and cut it into a transverse section and into a longitudinal section.' It is curious to note the difference in tone which there is between the children's books written by him and Maria and those of the second half of the nineteenth century. Our duty to our neighbour is the Edgeworth watchword, while our duty to God is the watchword of Miss Yonge and her school of writers. The swing of the pendulum is constantly passing from morality to religion and back again, because both are required for the perfect life. Among the experiments which Edgeworth made in the management of his children was that: 'Formerly' (Maria writes) 'from having observed how apt children are to dispute and quarrel when they are left much together, and from fear of the strong becoming tyrants, and the weak slaves, it had been thought prudent to separate them a good deal. It was believed that they would consequently grow fonder of each other's company, and that they would enjoy it more as they grew more reasonable, from not having the recollection of anything disagreeable in each other's tempers. But my father became thoroughly convinced that the separation of children in a family may lead to evils greater than any partial good that can result from it. The attempt may induce artifice and disobedience on the part of the children; the separation can scarcely be effected; and, if it were effected, would tend to make the children miserable. He saw that their little quarrels, and the crossings of their tempers and fancies, are nothing in comparison with the inestimable blessings of that fondness, that family affection which grows up among children, who have with each other an early and constant community of pleasures and pains. Separation as a punishment, as a just consequence of children's quarrelling, and as the best means of preventing their disputes, he always found useful. But, except in extreme cases, he had rarely recourse to it, and such seldom occurred. . . . The greatest change, which twenty years further experience made in his practice and opinions in education, was to lessen rather than to increase regulations and restrictions. He saw that, where there is liberty of action, one thing balances another; that nice calculations lead to false results in practice, because we cannot command all the necesssary circumstances of the data. . . . 'For many years of his life he had, I think, been under one important mistake, in his expectations relative to the conduct of his fellow-creatures, and of the effects of cultivating the human understanding. He had believed that, if rational creatures could be made clearly to see and understand that virtue will render them happy, and vice will render them miserable, either in this world or in the next, they would afterwards, in consequence of this conviction, follow virtue, and avoid vice. . . . 'Hence, both as to national and domestic education, he formerly dwelt principally upon the cultivation of the understanding, meaning chiefly the reasoning faculty as applied to the conduct. But to see the best, and to follow it, are not, alas! necessary consequences of each other. Resolution is often wanting where conviction is perfect. --Resolution is most necessary to all our active, and habit most essential to all our passive virtues. Probably nine times out of ten the instances of imprudent or vicious conduct arise, not from want of knowledge of good and evil, or from want of conviction that the one leads to happiness, and the other to misery; but from actual deficiency in the strength of resolution, deficiency arising from want of early training in the habit of self control.' Maria adds: 'The silence which has been observed in Practical Education on the subject of religion has been misunderstood by some, and misrepresented by others. ... To those who, with upright and benevolent intentions, from a sense of public duty, and in a spirit of Christian charity, made remonstrances on this subject, he thought it due to give all the explanation in his power;' and he writes: 'The authors continue to preserve the silence upon this subject, which they before thought prudent; but they disavow, in explicit terms, the design of laying down a system of education founded upon morality, exclusive of religion. . . . We most earnestly deprecate the imputation of disregarding religion in Education. . . . We are convinced that religious obligation is indispensably necessary in the education of all descriptions of people in every part of the world. 'We dread fanaticism and intolerance, whilst we wish to hold religion in a higher point of view than as a subject of seclusive possession, or of outward exhibition. To introduce the awful ideas of God's superintendence upon puerile occasions, we decline. ... I hope I shall obtain the justice due to me on the subject, and that it will appear that I consider religion, in the large sense of the word, to be the only certain bond of society. 'You have turned back our thoughts to this most important subject (education), upon which, next to a universal reverence for religion, we believe the happiness of mankind to depend.' Maria adds: 'I have often been witness of the care with which he explained the nature and enforced the observance of that great bond of civil society, which rests upon religion. The solemnity of the manner in which he administered an oath can never leave my memory; and I have seen the salutary effect this produced on the minds of those of the lower Irish, who are supposed to be the least susceptible of such impressions. But it was not on the terrors of religion he chiefly dwelt. No man could be more sensible than he was of the consolatory, fortifying influence of the Christian religion in sustaining the mind in adversity, poverty, and age. No man knew better its power to carry hope and peace in the hour of death to the penitent criminal. When from party bigotry it has happened that a priest has been denied admittance to the condemned criminal, my father has gone to the county gaol to soothe the sufferer's mind, and to receive that confession on which, to the poor Catholic's belief, his salvation depended. . . . Nor did he ever weaken in any heart in which it ever existed that which he considered as the greatest blessing that a human creature can enjoy--firm religious faith and hope.' The following extract from a letter written to the Roman Catholics of the County of Longford will show that Edgeworth was no bigoted Protestant, but was in advance of his time in the broad views he took of religious liberty: 'Ever since I have taken any part in the politics of Ireland, I have uniformly thought that there should be no civil distinctions between its inhabitants upon account of their religious opinions. I concurred with a great character at the national convention, in endeavouring to persuade our Roman Catholic brethren to take a decided part in favour of parliamentary reform. They declined it; and it then became absurd and dangerous for individuals to demand rights in the name of a class of citizens who would not avow their claim to them. . . . I wish ... to declare myself in favour of a full participation of rights amongst every denomination of men in Ireland; and if I can, by my personal interference at any public meeting of our county, serve your cause, I shall think it my duty to attend.' CHAPTER 7 DURING Edgeworth's stay in England in 1792 and 1793 he paid frequent visits to London, and he used to describe to his children a curious meeting which he had in a coffee-house with an old acquaintance whom he had not seen for thirty years: He observed a gentleman eyeing him with much attention, who at last exclaimed, "It is he. Certainly, sir, you are Mr. Edgeworth?" '"I am, sir." '"Gentlemen," said the stranger, with much importance, addressing himself to several people who were near him, "here is the best dancer in England, and a man to whom I am under infinite obligations, for I owe to him the foundation of my fortune. Mr. Edgeworth and I were scholars of the famous Aldridge; and once when we practised together, Mr. Edgeworth excelled me so much, that I sat down upon the ground, and burst out a-crying; he could actually complete an entrechat of ten distinct beats, which I could not accomplish! However, I was well consoled by him; for he invented, for Aldridge's benefit, The Tambourine Dance, which had uncommon success. The dresses were Chinese. Twelve assistants held small drums furnished with bells; these were struck in the air by the dancer's feet when held as high as their arms could reach. This Aldridge performed, and improved upon by stretching his legs asunder, so as to strike two drums at the same time. Those not being the days of elegant dancing, I afterwards," continued the stranger, "exhibited at Paris the tambourine dance, to so much advantage, that I made fifteen hundred pounds by it." 'The person who made this singular address and eulogium was the celebrated dancer, Mr. Slingsby. His testimony proves that my father did not overrate his powers as a dancer; but it was not to boast of a frivolous excellence that he told this anecdote to his children; it was to express his satisfaction at having, after the first effervescence of boyish spirits had subsided, cultivated his understanding, turned his inventive powers to useful objects, and chosen as the companions of his maturer years men of the first order of intellect.' He also took the opportunity while in England of visiting his scientific friends--Watt, Darwin, Keir, and Wedgwood; and it was now that his friendship began with Mr. William Strutt of Derby, with whom he became acquainted by means of Mr. Darwin. It was about this time that he lost his old friend Lord Longford. Maria says of him: 'His services in the British navy, and his character as an Irish senator, have been fully appreciated by the public. His value in private life, and as a friend, can be justly estimated only by those who have seen and felt how strongly his example and opinions have, for a long course of years, continued to influence his family, and all who had the honour of his friendship. The permanence of this influence after death is a stronger proof of the sincerity of the esteem and admiration felt for the character of the individual than any which can be given during his lifetime. I can bear witness that, in one instance, it never ceased to operate. I know that on every important occasion of my father's life, where he was called upon to judge or act, long after Lord Longford was no more, his example and opinions seemed constantly present to him; he delighted in the recollection of instances of his friend's sound judgment, honour, and generosity; these he applied in his own conduct, and held up to the emulation of his children.' Doubtless Edgeworth felt, as Charles Lamb expresses it: 'Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within the last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Captain Burney gone! What fun has whist now? What matters it what you lead if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? One never hears anything but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence. Thus one distributes oneself about, and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market.' The departure of Edgeworth and his family from Clifton in the autumn of 1793 was hastened by the news that disturbances were breaking out in Ireland. Dr. Beddoes of Clifton, who was courting Edgeworth's daughter Anna, had to console himself with the permission to follow her to Ireland in the spring, where they were married at Edgeworth Town in April 1794. It was not till the autumn of 1794 that the disturbances in Ireland became alarming; and in a letter to Dr. Darwin, Edgeworth writes: 'Just recovering from the alarm occasioned by a sudden irruption of defenders into this neighbourhood, and from the business of a county meeting, and the glory of commanding a squadron of horse, and from the exertion requisite to treat with proper indifference an anonymous letter sent by persons who have sworn to assassinate me; I received the peaceful philosophy of Zoonomia; and though it has been in my hands not many minutes, I found much to delight and instruct me. . . . 'We were lately in a sad state here--the sans culottes (literally so) took a very effectual way of obtaining power; they robbed of arms all the houses in the country, thus arming themselves and disarming their opponents. By waking the bodies of their friends, the human corpse not only becomes familiar to the sans culottes of Ireland, but is associated with pleasure in their minds by the festivity of these nocturnal orgies. An insurrection of such people, who have been much oppressed, must be infinitely more horrid than anything that has happened in France; for no hired executioners need be sought from the prisons or the galleys. And yet the people here are altogether better than in England. . . . The peasants, though cruel, are generally docile, and of the strongest powers, both of body and mind. 'A good government may make this a great country, because the raw material is good and simple. In England, to make a carte-blanche fit to receive a proper impression, you must grind down all the old rags to purify them.' His daughter adds: 'The disturbances in the county of Longford were quieted for a time by the military; but again in the autumn of the ensuing year (September 1796), rumours of an invasion prevailed, and spread with redoubled force through Ireland, disturbing commerce, and alarming all ranks of well-disposed subjects.' CHAPTER 8 It was in 1797 that sorrow again visited the happy circle at Edgeworth Town, and Edgeworth wrote thus of his wife to Dr. Darwin: 'She declines rapidly. But her mind suffers as little as possible. I am convinced from all that I have seen, that good sense diminishes all the evils of life, and alleviates even the inevitable pain of declining health. By good sense, I mean that habit of the understanding which employs itself in forming just estimates of every object that lies before it, and in regulating the temper and conduct. Mrs. Edgeworth, ever since I knew her, has carefully improved and cultivated this faculty; and I do not think I ever saw any person extract more good, and suffer less evil, than she has, from the events of life. . . .' Mrs. Edgeworth died in the autumn of the year 1797. Maria adds: 'I have heard my father say, that during the seventeen years of his marriage with this lady, he never once saw her out of temper, and never received from her an unkind word or an angry look,' Edgeworth paid the same compliment to his third wife which he had done to his second--he quickly replaced her. His fourth wife was the daughter of Dr. Beaufort, a highly cultivated man, whose family were great friends of Mrs. Ruxton, Edgeworth's sister. Edgeworth wrote a long letter about scientific matters to Darwin, and kept his most important news to the last: 'I am going to be married to a young lady of small fortune and large accomplishments,--compared with my age, much youth (not quite thirty), and more prudence--some beauty, more sense--uncommon talents, more uncommon temper,--liked by my family, loved by me. If I can say all this three years hence, shall not I have been a fortunate, not to say a wise man?' Maria adds: 'A few days after the preceding letter was written, we heard that a conspiracy had been discovered in Dublin, that the city was under arms, and its inhabitants in the greatest terror. Dr. Beaufort and his family were there; my father, who was at Edgeworth Town, set out immediately to join them. 'On his way he met an intimate friend of his; one stage they travelled together, and a singular conversation passed. This friend, who as yet knew nothing of my father's intentions, began to speak of the marriage of some other person, and to exclaim against the folly and imprudence of any man's marrying in such disturbed times. "No man of honour, sense or feeling, would incumber himself with a wife at such a time!" My father urged that this was just the time when a man of honour, sense, or feeling would wish, if he loved a woman, to unite his fate with hers, to acquire the right of being her protector. 'The conversation dropped there. But presently they talked of public affairs--of the important measure expected to be proposed, of a union between England and Ireland--of what would probably be said and done in the next session of Parliament: my father, foreseeing that this important national question would probably come on, had just obtained a seat in Parliament. His friend, not knowing or recollecting this, began to speak of the imprudence of commencing a political career late in life. '"No man, you know," said he, "but a fool, would venture to make a first speech in Parliament, or to marry, after he was fifty." 'My father laughed, and surrendering all title to wisdom, declared that, though he was past fifty, he was actually going in a few days, as he hoped, to be married, and in a few months would probably make his "first speech in Parliament." 'He found Dublin as it had been described to him under arms, in dreadful expectation. The timely apprehension of the heads of the conspiracy at this crisis prevented a revolution, and saved the capital. But the danger for the country seemed by no means over, --insurrections, which were to have been general and simultaneous, broke out in different parts of the kingdom. The confessions of a conspirator, who had turned informer, and the papers seized and published, proved that there existed in the country a deep and widely spread spirit of rebellion. . . . 'Instead of delaying his marriage, which some would have advised, my father urged for an immediate day. On the 31st of May he was married to Miss Beaufort, by her brother, the Rev. William Beaufort, at St. Anne's Church in Dublin. They came down to Edgeworth Town immediately, through a part of the country that was in actual insurrection. Late in the evening they arrived safe at home, and my father presented his bride to his expecting, anxious family. 'Of her first entrance and appearance that evening I can recollect only the general impression, that it was quite natural, without effort or pretension. The chief thing remarkable was, that she, of whom we were all thinking so much, seemed to think so little of herself. . . . 'The sisters of the late Mrs. Edgeworth, those excellent aunts (Mrs. Mary and Charlotte Sneyd), instead of returning to their English friends and relations, remained at Edgeworth Town. This was an auspicious omen to the common people in our neighbourhood, by whom they were universally beloved--it spoke well, they said, for the new lady. In his own family, the union and happiness she would secure were soon felt, but her superior qualities, her accurate knowledge, judgment, and abilities, in decision and in action, appeared only as occasions arose and called for them. She was found always equal to the occasion, and superior to the expectation.' Maria had not at first been in favour of her father's marrying Miss Beaufort, but she soon changed her opinion after becoming intimate with her, and writing of her father's choice of a wife says: 'He did not late in life marry merely to please his own fancy, but he chose a companion suited to himself, and a mother fit for his family. This, of all the blessings we owe to him, has proved the greatest.' The family at Edgeworth Town passed the summer quietly and happily, but (Maria continues) 'towards the autumn of the year 1798, this country became in such a state that the necessity of resorting to the sword seemed imminent. Even in the county of Longford, which had so long remained quiet, alarming symptoms appeared, not immediately in our neighbourhood, but within six or seven miles of us, near Granard. The people were leagued in secret rebellion, and waited only for the expected arrival of the French army to break out. In the adjacent counties military law had been proclaimed, and our village was within a mile of the bounds of the disturbed county of Westmeath. Though his own tenantry, and all in whom he put trust, were as quiet, and, as far as he could judge, as well-disposed as ever, yet my father was aware, from information of too good authority to be doubted, that there were disaffected persons in the vicinity. 'Numbers held themselves in abeyance, not so much from disloyalty, as from fear that they should be ultimately the conquered party. Those who were really and actually engaged, and in communication with the rebels and with the foreign enemy, were so secret and cunning that no proofs could be obtained against them. 'One instance may be given. A Mr. Pallas, who lived at Growse Hall, lately received information that a certain offender was to be found in a lone house, which was described to him. He took a party of men with him in the night, and he got to the house very early in the morning. It was scarcely light. The soldiers searched, but no man was to be found. Mr. Pallas ordered them to search again, for that he was certain the man was in the house; they searched again, but in vain; they gave up the point, and were preparing to mount their horses, when one man, who had stayed a little behind his companions, saw, or thought he saw, something move at the end of the garden behind the house. He looked, and beheld a man's arm come out of the ground: he ran to the spot and called to his companions; but the arm disappeared; they searched, but nothing was to be seen; and though the soldier still persisted in his story, he was not believed "Come," cries one of the party, "don't waste your time here looking for an apparition among these cabbage-stalks--go back once more to the house!" They went to the house, and lo! there stood the man they were in search of in the middle of the kitchen. 'Upon examination it was found that from his garden to his house there had been practiced a secret passage underground: a large meal-chest in the kitchen had a false bottom, which lifted up and down at pleasure, to let him into his subterraneous dwelling. 'Whenever he expected the house to be searched, down he went; the moment the search was over, up he came; and had practised this with success, till he grew rash, and returned one moment too soon. . . . 'Previous to this time, the principal gentry in the county had raised corps of yeomanry; but my father had delayed doing so, because, as long as the civil authority had been sufficient, he was unwilling to resort to military interference, or to the ultimate law of force, of the abuse of which he had seen too many recent examples. However, it now became necessary, even for the sake of justice to his own tenantry, that they should be put upon a footing with others, have equal security of protection, and an opportunity of evincing their loyal dispositions. He raised a corps of infantry, into which he admitted Catholics as well as Protestants. This was so unusual, and thought to be so hazardous a degree of liberality, that by some of an opposite party it was attributed to the worst motives. Many who wished him well came privately to let him know of the odium to which he exposed himself. 'The corps of Edgeworth Town infantry was raised, but the arms were, by some mistake of the ordnance officer, delayed. The anxiety for their arrival was extreme, for every day and every hour the French were expected to land. 'The alarm was now so general that many sent their families out of the country. My father was still in hopes that we might safely remain. At the first appearance of disturbance in Ireland he had offered to carry his sisters-in-law, the Mrs. Sneyd, to their friends in England, but this offer they refused. Of the domestics, three men were English and Protestant, two Irish and Catholic; the women were all Irish and Catholic excepting the housekeeper, an Englishwoman who had lived with us many years. There were no dissensions or suspicions between the Catholics and the Protestants in the family; and the English servants did not desire to quit us at this crisis. 'At last came the dreaded news. The French, who landed at Killala, were, as we learned, on their march towards Longford. The touch of Ithuriel's spear could not have been more sudden or effectual than the arrival of this intelligence in showing people in their real forms. In some faces joy struggled for a moment with feigned sorrow, and then, encouraged by sympathy, yielded to the natural expression. Still my father had no reason to distrust those in whom he had placed confidence; his tenants were steady; he saw no change in any of the men of his corps, though they were in the most perilous situation, having rendered themselves obnoxious to the rebels and invaders by becoming yeomen, and yet standing without means of resistance or defence, their arms not having arrived. 'The evening of the day when the news of the success and approach of the French came to Edgeworth Town all seemed quiet; but early next morning, September 4th, a report reached us that the rebels were up in arms within a mile of the village, pouring in from the county of Westmeath hundreds strong. 'This much being certain, that men armed with pikes were assembled, my father sent off an express to the next garrison town (Longford) requesting the commanding officer to send him assistance for the defence of this place. He desired us to be prepared to set out at a moment's warning. We were under this uncertainty, when an escort with an ammunition cart passed through the village on its way to Longford. It contained several barrels of powder, intended to blow up the bridges, and to stop the progress of the enemy. One of the officers of the party rode up to our house and offered to let us have the advantage of his escort. But, after a few minutes' deliberation, this friendly proposal was declined: my father determined that he would not stir till he knew whether he could have assistance; and as it did not appear as yet absolutely necessary that we should go, we stayed--fortunately for us. 'About a quarter of an hour after the officer and the escort had departed, we, who were all assembled in the portico of the house, heard a report like a loud clap of thunder. The doors and windows shook with some violent concussion; a few minutes afterwards the officer galloped into the yard, and threw himself off his horse into my father's arms almost senseless. The ammunition cart had blown up, one of the officers had been severely wounded, and the horses and the man leading them killed; the wounded officer was at a farmhouse on the Longford road, at about two miles' distance. The fear of the rebels was now suspended in concern for this accident; Mrs. Edgeworth went immediately to give her assistance; she left her carriage for the use of the wounded gentleman, and rode back. At the entrance of the village she was stopped by a gentleman in great terror, who, taking hold of the bridle of her horse, begged her not to attempt to go farther, assuring her that the rebels were coming into the town. But she answered that she must and would return to her family. She rode on, and found us waiting anxiously for her. No assistance could be afforded from Longford; the rebels were reassembling, and advancing towards the village; and there was no alternative but to leave our house as fast as possible. One of our carriages having been left with the wounded officer, we had but one at this moment for our whole family, eleven in number. No mode of conveyance could be had for some of our female servants; our faithful English housekeeper offered to stay till the return of the carriage, which had been left with the officer; and as we could not carry her, we were obliged, most reluctantly, to leave her behind to follow, as we hoped, immediately. As we passed through the village we heard nothing but the entreaties, lamentations, and objurations of those who could not procure the means of carrying off their goods or their families; most painful when we could give no assistance. 'Next to the safety of his own family, my father's greatest anxiety was for his defenceless corps. No men could behave better than they did at this first moment of trial. Not one absented himself, though many, living at a distance, might, if they had been so inclined, have found plausible excuses for non-appearance. 'He ordered them to march to Longford. The idea of going to Longford could not be agreeable to many of them, who were Catholics. There was no reluctance shown, however, by the Catholics of this corps to go among those who called themselves Orangemen. 'We expected every instant to hear the shout of the rebels entering Edgeworth Town. When we had got about half-a-mile out of the village, my father suddenly recollected that he had left on his table a paper containing a list of his corps, and that, if this should come into the hands of the rebels, it might be of dangerous consequence to his men; it would serve to point out their houses for pillage, and their families for destruction. He turned his horse instantly and galloped back for it. The time of his absence appeared immeasurably long, but he returned safely after having destroyed the dangerous paper. 'Longford was crowded with yeomanry of various corps, and with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who had flocked thither for protection. With great difficulty the poor Edgeworth Town infantry found lodgings. We were cordially received by the landlady of a good inn. Though her house was, as she said, fuller than it could hold, as she was an old friend of my father's, she did contrive to give us two rooms, in which we eleven were thankful to find ourselves. All our concern now was for those we had left behind. We heard nothing of our housekeeper all night, and were exceedingly alarmed; but early the next morning, to our great joy, she arrived. She told us that, after we had left her, she waited hour after hour for the carriage; she could hear nothing of it, as it had gone to Longford with the wounded officer. Towards evening, a large body of rebels entered the village; she heard them at the gate, and expected that they would have broken in the next instant; but one, who seemed to be a leader, with a pike in his hand, set his back against the gate, and swore that, if he was to die for it the next minute, he would have the life of the first man who should open that gate or set enemy's foot withinside of that place. He said the housekeeper, who was left in it, was a good gentlewoman, and had done him a service, though she did not know him, nor he her. He had never seen her face, but she had, the year before, lent his wife, when in distress, sixteen shillings, the rent of flax-ground, and he would stand her friend now. 'He kept back the mob: they agreed to send him to the house with a deputation of six, to know the truth, and to ask for arms. The six men went to the back door and summoned the housekeeper; one of them pointed his blunderbuss at her, and told her that she must fetch all the arms in the house; she said she had none. Her champion asked her to say if she remembered him. "No," to her knowledge she had never seen his face. He asked if she remembered having lent a woman money to pay her rent of flaxground the year before. "Yes," she remembered that, and named the woman, the time, and the sum. His companions were thus satisfied of the truth of what he had asserted. He bid her not to be frighted, for that no harm should happen to her, nor any belonging to her; not a soul should get leave to go into her master's house; not a twig should be touched, nor a leaf harmed. His companions huzzaed and went off. Afterwards, as she was told, he mounted guard at the gate during the whole time the rebels were in the town. 'When the carriage at last returned, it was stopped by the rebels, who filled the street; they held their pikes to the horses and to the coachman's breast, accusing him of being an Orangeman, because, as they said, he wore the orange colours (our livery being yellow and brown). A painter, a friend of ours, who had been that day at our house, copying some old family portraits, happened to be in the street at that instant, and called out to the mob, "Gentlemen, it is yellow! Gentlemen, it is not orange!" In consequence of this happy distinction they let go the coachman; and the same man who had mounted guard at the gate, came up with his friends, rescued the carriage, and surrounding the coachman with their pikes brought him safely into the yard. The pole of the carriage having been broken in the first onset, the housekeeper could not leave Edgeworth Town till morning. She passed the night in walking up and down, listening and watching, but the rebels returned no more, and thus our house was saved by the gratitude of a single individual. 'We had scarcely time to rejoice in the escape of our housekeeper and safety of our house, when we found that new dangers arose even from this escape. The house being saved created jealousy and suspicion in the minds of many, who at this time saw everything through the mist of party prejudice. The dislike to my father's corps appeared every hour more strong. He saw the consequences that might arise from the slightest breaking out of quarrel. It was not possible for him to send his men, unarmed as they still were, to their homes, lest they should be destroyed by the rebels; yet the officers of the other corps wished to have them sent out of the town, and to this effect joined in a memorial to government. Some of these officers disliked my father, from differences of electioneering interests; others, from his not having kept up an acquaintance with them; and others, not knowing him in the least, were misled by party reports and misrepresentations. 'These petty dissensions were, however, at one moment suspended and forgotten in a general sense of danger. An express arrived late one night with the news that the French, who were rapidly advancing, were within a few miles of the town of Longford. A panic seized the people. There were in the town eighty of the carabineers and two corps of yeomanry, but it was proposed to evacuate the garrison. My father strongly opposed this measure, and undertook, with fifty men, if arms and ammunition were supplied, to defend the gaol of Longford, where there was a strong pass, at which the enemy might be stopped. He urged that a stand might be made there till the King's army should come up. The offer was gladly accepted--men, arms, and ammunition, all he could want or desire, were placed at his disposal. He slept that night in the gaol, with everything prepared for its defence; but the next morning fresh news came, that the French had turned off from the Longford Road, and were going towards Granard; of this, however, there was no certainty. My father, by the desire of the commanding officer, rode out to reconnoitre, and my brother went to the top of the courthouse with a telescope for the same purpose. We (Mrs. Edgeworth, my aunts, my sisters, and myself) were waiting to hear the result in one of the upper sitting-rooms of the inn, which fronted the street. We heard a loud shout, and going to the window, we saw the people throwing up their hats, and heard huzzas. An express had arrived with news that the French and the rebels had been beaten; that General Lake had come up with them at a place called Ballynamuck, near Granard; that 1500 rebels and French were killed, and that the French generals and officers were prisoners. 'We were impatient for my father, when we heard this joyful news; he had not yet returned, and we looked out of the window in hopes of seeing him; but we could see only a great number of people of the town shaking hands with each other. This lasted a few minutes, and then the crowd gathered in silence round one man, who spoke with angry vehemence and gesticulation, stamping, and frequently wiping his forehead. We thought he was a mountebank haranguing the populace, till we saw that he wore a uniform. Listening with curiosity to hear what he was saying, we observed that he looked up towards us, and we thought we heard him pronounce the names of my father and brother in tones of insult. We could scarcely believe what we heard him say. Pointing up to the top of the court-house, he exclaimed, "That young Edgeworth ought to be dragged down from the top of that house." 'Our housekeeper burst into the room, so much terrified she could hardly speak. '"My master, ma'am!--it is all against my master. The mob say they will tear him to pieces, if they catch hold of him. They say he 's a traitor, that he illuminated the gaol to deliver it up to the French." 'No words can give an idea of our astonishment. "Illuminated!" What could be meant by the gaol being illuminated? My father had literally but two farthing candles, by the light of which he had been reading the newspaper late the preceding night. These, however, were said to be signals for the enemy. The absurdity of the whole was so glaring that we could scarcely conceive the danger to be real, but our pale landlady's fears were urgent; she dreaded that her house should be pulled down. 'We wrote immediately to the commanding officer, informing him of what we had heard, and requesting his advice and assistance. He came to us, and recommended that we should send a messenger to warn Mr. Edgeworth of his danger, and to request that he would not return to Longford that day. The officer added that, in consequence of the rejoicings for the victory, his men would probably be all drunk in a few hours, and that he could not answer for them. This officer, a captain of yeomanry, was a good-natured but inefficient man, who spoke under considerable nervous agitation, and seemed desirous to do all he could, but not to be able to do anything. We wrote instantly, and with difficulty found a man who undertook to convey the note. It was to be carried to meet him on one road, and Mrs. Edgeworth and I determined to drive out to meet him on the other. We made our way down a back staircase into the inn yard, where the carriage was ready. Several gentlemen spoke to us as we got into the carriage, begging us not to be alarmed: Mrs. Edgeworth answered that she was more surprised than alarmed. The commanding officer and the sovereign of Longford walked by the side of the carriage through the town; and as the mob believed that we were going away not to return, we got through without much molestation. We went a few miles on the road toward Edgeworth Town, till at a tenant's house we heard that my father had passed half an hour ago; that he was riding in company with an officer, supposed to be of Lord Cornwallis's or General Lake's army; that they had taken a short cut, which led into Longford by another entrance:--most fortunately, not that at which an armed mob had assembled, expecting the object of their fury. Seeing him return to the inn with an officer of the King's army, they imagined, as we were afterwards told, that he was brought back a prisoner, and they were satisfied. 'The moment we saw him safe, we laughed at our own fears, and again doubted the reality of the danger, more especially as he treated the idea with the utmost incredulity and scorn. 'Major (now General) Eustace was the officer who returned with him. He dined with us; everything appeared quiet. The persons who had taken refuge at the inn were now gone to their homes, and it was supposed that, whatever dispositions to riot had existed, the news of the approach of some of Lord Cornwallis's suite, or of troops who were to bring in the French prisoners, would prevent all probability of disturbance. In the evening the prisoners arrived at the inn; a crowd followed them, but quietly. A sun-burnt, coarse-looking man, in a huge cocked hat, with a quantity of gold lace on his clothes, seemed to fix all attention; he was pointed out as the French General Homberg, or Sarrazin. As he dismounted from his horse, he threw the bridle over its neck, and looked at the animal as being his only friend. 'We heard my father in the evening ask Major Eustace to walk with him through the town to the barrack-yard to evening parade; and we saw them go out together without our feeling the slightest apprehension. We remained at the inn. By this time Colonel Handfield, Major Cannon, and some other officers, had arrived, and they were at the inn at dinner in a parlour on the ground-floor, under our room. It being hot weather, the windows were open. Nothing now seemed to be thought of but rejoicings for the victory. Candles were preparing for the illumination; waiters, chambermaids, landlady, were busy scooping turnips and potatoes for candlesticks, to stand in every pane of every loyal window. 'In the midst of this preparation, half an hour after my father had left us, we heard a great uproar in the street. At first we thought the shouts were only rejoicings for victory, but as they came nearer we heard screechings and yellings indescribably horrible. A mob had gathered at the gates of the barrack-yard, and joined by many soldiers of the yeomanry on leaving parade, had followed Major Eustace and my father from the barracks. The Major being this evening in coloured clothes, the people no longer knew him to be an officer, nor conceived, as they had done before, that Mr. Edgeworth was his prisoner. The mob had not contented themselves with the horrid yells that they heard, but had been pelting them with hard turf, stones, and brickbats. From one of these my father received a blow on the side of his head, which came with such force as to stagger and almost to stun him; but he kept himself from falling, knowing that if he once fell he would be trampled under foot. He walked on steadily till he came within a few yards of the inn, when one of the mob seized hold of Major Eustace by the collar. My father seeing the windows of the inn open, called with a loud voice, "Major Eustace is in danger!" 'The officers, who were at dinner, and who till that moment had supposed the noise in the street to be only drunken rejoicings, immediately ran out and rescued Major Eustace and my father. At the sight of British officers and drawn swords, the populace gave way, and dispersed in different directions. 'The preparation for the illumination then went on as if nothing had intervened. All the panes of our windows in the front room were in a blaze of light by the time the mob returned through the street. The night passed without further disturbance. 'As early as we could the next morning we left Longford, and returned homewards, all danger from rebels being now over, and the Rebellion having been terminated by the late battle. 'When we came near Edgeworth Town, we saw many well-known faces at the cabin doors looking out to welcome us. One man, who was digging in his field by the roadside, when he looked up as our horses passed, and saw my father, let fall his spade and clasped his hands; his face, as the morning sun shone upon it, was the strongest picture of joy I ever saw. The village was a melancholy spectacle; windows shattered and doors broken. But though the mischief done was great, there had been little pillage. Within our gates we found all property safe; literally "not a twig touched, nor a leaf harmed." Within the house everything was as we had left it--a map that we had been consulting was still open upon the library table, with pencils, and slips of paper containing the first lessons in arithmetic, in which some of the young people had been engaged the morning we had driven from home; a pansy, in a glass of water, which one of the children had been copying, was still on the chimney-piece. These trivial circumstances, marking repose and tranquillity, struck us at this moment with an unreasonable sort of surprise, and all that had passed seemed like an incoherent dream. The joy of having my father in safety remained, and gratitude to Heaven for his preservation. These feelings spread inexpressible pleasure over what seemed to be a new sense of existence. Even the most common things appeared delightful; the green lawn, the still groves, the birds singing, the fresh air, all external nature, and all the goods and conveniences of life, seemed to have wonderfully increased in value from the fear into which we had been put of losing them irrevocably. 'The first thing my father did, the day we came home, was to draw up a memorial to the Lord-Lieutenant, desiring to have a court-martial held on the sergeant who, by haranguing the populace, had raised the mob at Longford; his next care was to walk through the village, to examine what damage had been done by the rebels, and to order that repairs of all his tenants' houses should be made at his expense. A few days after our return, Government ordered that the arms of the Edgeworth Town infantry should be forwarded by the commanding-officer at Longford. Through the whole of their hard week's trial the corps had, without any exception, behaved perfectly well. It was perhaps more difficult to honest and brave men passively to bear such a trial than any to which they could have been exposed in action. 'When the arms for the corps arrived, my father, in delivering them to the men, thanked them publicly for their conduct, assuring them that he would remember it whenever he should have opportunities of serving them, collectively or individually. In long-after years, as occasions arose, each who continued to deserve it found in him a friend, and felt that he more than fulfilled his promise. . . . Before we quit this subject, it may be useful to record that the French generals who headed this invasion declared they had been completely deceived as to the state of Ireland. They had expected to find the people in open rebellion, or at least, in their own phrase, organised for insurrection; but to their dismay they found only ragamuffins, as they called them, who, in joining their standard, did them infinitely more harm than good. It is a pity that the lower Irish could not hear the contemptuous manner in which the French, both officers and soldiers, spoke of them and of their country. The generals described the stratagems which had been practised upon them by their good allies--the same rebels frequently returning with different tones and new stories, to obtain double and treble provisions of arms, ammunition, and uniforms--selling the ammunition for whisky, and running away at the first fire in the day of battle. The French, detesting and despising those by whom they had been thus cheated, pillaged, and deserted, called them beggars, rascals, and savages. They cursed also without scruple their own Directory for sending them, after they had, as they boasted, conquered the world, to be at last beaten on an Irish bog. Officers and soldiers joined in swearing that they would never return to a country where they could find neither bread, wine, nor discipline, and where the people lived on roots, whisky, and lying.' Maria ends this exciting chapter of the Memoirs with these moral reflections: 'At all times it is disadvantageous to those who have the reputation of being men of superior abilities, to seclude themselves from the world. It raises a belief that they despise those with whom they do not associate; and this supposed contempt creates real aversion. The being accused of pride or singularity may not, perhaps, in the estimation of some lofty spirits and independent characters, appear too great a price to pay for liberty and leisure; they will care little if they be misunderstood or misrepresented by the vulgar; they will trust to truth and time to do them justice. This may be all well in ordinary life, and in peaceable days; but in civil commotions the best and the wisest, if he have not made himself publicly known, so as to connect himself with the interests and feelings of his neighbours, will find none to answer for his character if it be attacked, or to warn him of the secret machinations of his enemies; none who on any sudden emergency will risk their own safety in his defence: he may fall and be trampled upon by numbers, simply because it is nobody's business or pleasure to rally to his aid. Time and reason right his character, and may bring all who have injured, or all who have mistaken him, to repentance and shame, but in the interval he must suffer--he may perish.' Chapter 9. The British Government seem to have thought it best at this time to pursue a laissez faire policy in Ireland, in order to convince the Irish of their weakness, and to show them that, although a bundle of sticks when loosened allows each stick to be used for beating, and it may therefore be argued that sticks, being meant for fighting, should never be bound in a bundle, yet each single stick may easily get broken. Of course the Government intended to intervene before it was too late, and to suggest to the Irish that it was time to think of a union with their stronger neighbours. On this subject, Maria remarks: 'It is certain that the combinations of the disaffected at home and the advance of foreign invaders, were not checked till the peril became imminent, and till the purpose of creating universal alarm had been fully effected. As soon as the Commander-in-Chief and the Lord-Lieutenant (at the time joined in the same person) exerted his full military and civil power, the invaders were defeated, and the rebellion was extinguished. The petty magisterial tyrants, who had been worse than vain of their little brief authority, were put down, or rather, being no longer upheld, sank to their original and natural insignificance. The laws returned to their due course; and, with justice, security and tranquillity, were restored. 'My father honestly, not ostentatiously, used his utmost endeavours to obliterate all that could tend to perpetuate ill-will in the country. Among the lower classes in his neighbourhood he endeavoured to discourage that spirit of recrimination and retaliation which the lower Irish are too prone to cherish, and of which they are proud. "Revenge is sweet, and I'll have it" were words which an old beggar-woman was overheard muttering to herself as she tottered along the road. . . . 'The lower Irish are such acute observers that there is no deceiving them as to the state of the real feelings of their superiors. . . . 'It was soon seen by all of those who had any connection with him, that my father was sincere in his disdain of vengeance--of this they had convincing proof in his refusing to listen to the tales of slander, which so many were ready to pour into his ear, against those who had appeared to be his enemies. 'They saw that he determined to have a public trial of the man who had instigated the Longford mob, but that, for the sake of justice, and to record what his own conduct had been, he did not seek this trial from any petty motives of personal resentment. 'During the course of the trial, it appeared that the sergeant was a mere ignorant enthusiast, who had been worked up to frenzy by some, more designing than himself. Having accomplished his own object of publicly proving every fact that concerned his own honour and character, my father felt desirous that the poor culprit, who was now ashamed and penitent, should not be punished. The evidence was not pressed against him, and he was acquitted. As they were leaving the courthouse my father saw, and spoke in a playful tone to the penitent sergeant, who, among his other weaknesses, happened to be much afraid of ghosts. "Sergeant, I congratulate you," said he, "upon my being alive here before you--I believe you would rather meet me than my ghost!" Then cheering up the man with the assurance of his perfect forgiveness, he passed on. 'The malevolent passions' my father always considered as the greatest foes to human felicity--they would not stay in his mind--he was of too good and too happy a nature. He forgot all, but the moral which he drew for his private use from this Longford business. He kept ever afterwards the resolution he had made, to mix more with general society. 'His thoughts were soon called to that most important question, of the Union between England and Ireland, which it was expected would be discussed at the meeting of Parliament. 'It was late in life to begin a political career--imprudently so, had it been with the common views of family advancement or of personal fame; but his chief hope, in going into Parliament, was to obtain assistance in forwarding the great object of improving the education of the people: he wished also to assist in the discussion of the Union. He was not without a natural desire, which he candidly avowed, to satisfy himself how far he could succeed as a parliamentary speaker, and how far his mind would stand the trial of political competition or the temptations of ambition. 'On the subject of the Union he had not yet been able, in parliamentary phrase, to make up his mind: and he went to the House in that state in which so many profess to find themselves, and so few ever really are--anxious to hear the arguments on both sides, and open to be decided by whoever could show him that which was best for his country. 'The debate on the first proposal of the Union was protracted to an unusual length, and when he rose to speak, it was late at night, or rather it was early in the morning--two o'clock--the House had been so wearied that many of the members were asleep. It was an inauspicious moment. No person present, not even the Speaker, who was his intimate friend, could tell on which side he would vote. Curiosity was excited: some of the outstretched members were roused by their neighbours, whose anxiety to know on which side he would vote prompted them to encourage him to proceed. This curiosity was kept alive as he went on; and when people perceived that it was not a set speech, they became interested. He stated his doubts, just as they had really occurred, balancing the arguments as he threw them by turns into each scale, as they had balanced one another in his judgment; so that the doubtful beam nodded from side to side, while all watched to see when its vibrations would settle. All the time he kept both parties in good humour, because each expected to have him their own at last. After stating many arguments in favour of what appeared to him to be the advantages of the Union, he gave his vote against it, because, he said, he had been convinced by what he had heard in that House this night, that the Union was at this time decidedly against the wishes of the great majority of men of sense and property in the nation. He added that if he should be convinced that the opinion of the country changed at the final discussion of the question, his vote would be in its favour. 'One of the anti-Unionists, who happened not to know my father personally, imagined from his accent, style, and manner of speaking, that he was an Englishman, and accused the Government of having brought a new member over from England, to impose him upon the House, as an impartial country gentleman, who was to make a pretence of liberality by giving a vote against the Union, while, by arguing in its favour, he was to make converts for the measure. Many on the Ministerial bench, who had still hopes that, on a future occasion, Mr. Edgeworth might be convinced and brought to vote with them, complimented him highly, declaring that they were completely surprised when they learned how he voted; for that undoubtedly the best arguments on their side of the question had been produced in his speech. Lord Castlereagh found the measure so much against the sense of the House that he pressed it no further at that time. 'This session my father had the satisfaction of turning the attention of the House to a subject which he considered to be of greater and more permanent importance than the Union, or than any merely political measure could prove to his country, the education of the people. By his exertions a select committee was appointed, and they adopted the resolutions drawn up by him. When the report of this committee was brought up to the House, my father spoke at large upon the subject. 'In his speech he said: It was impossible, when moral principles are instilled into the human mind, when people are regularly taught their duty to God and man, that abominable tenets can prevail to the subversion of subordination and society. He would venture to assert, though the power of the sword was great, that the force of education was greater. It was notorious that the writings of one man, Mr. Burke, had changed the opinions of the whole people of England against the French Revolution. ... If proper books were circulated through the country, and if the public mind was prepared for the reception of their doctrines, it would be impossible to make the ignorance of the people an instrument of national ruin. 'There is, he contended, a fund of goodness in the Irish as well as in the English nature. Did God give different minds to different countries? No, the difference of mind arose from education. It therefore became the duty of Parliament to improve as much as possible the public understanding--for the misfortunes of Ireland were owing not to the heart, but the head: the defect was not from nature, but from want of culture. 'During this session my father spoke again two or three times, on some questions of revenue regulations and excise laws: of little consequence separately considered, but of importance in one respect, in their effect on the morality of the people. He pointed out that nothing could with more certainty tend to increase the crime of perjury than the multiplying custom-house oaths, and what are termed oaths of office. ... In Ireland the habits of the common people are already too lax with regard to truth. The difference of religion, and the facilities of absolution, present difficulties so formidable to their moral improvement as to require all the counteracting powers of education, example, public opinion, and law. . . . Multiplying oaths injures the revenue, by increasing incalculably the means of evading the very laws and penalties by which it is attempted to bind the subject. Experience proves that this is a danger of no small account to the revenue; though trifling when compared with the importance of the general effect on national morality, and on the safety and tranquillity of the State, all which must ultimately rest, at all times and in all countries, upon religious sanctions. "It was not," my father observed, "by increasing pains and penalties, or by any severity of punishment, that the observance of laws can be secured; on the contrary, small but certain punishments, and few but punctually executed laws, are most likely to secure obedience, and to effect public prosperity."' He writes to Darwin in March 1800: 'The fatigue of the session was enormous. I am a Unionist, but I vote and speak against the union now proposed to us--as to my reasons, are they not published in the reports of our debates? It is intended to force this measure down the throats of the Irish, though five-sixths of the nation are against it. Now, though I think such union as would identify the nations, so as that Ireland should be as Yorkshire to Great Britain, would be an excellent thing: yet I also think that the good people of Ireland ought to be persuaded of this truth, and not be dragooned into the submission. 'The Minister avows that seventy-two boroughs are to be compensated --i.e. bought by the people of Ireland with one million and a half of their own money; and he makes this legal by a very small majority, made up chiefly by these very borough members. When thirty-eight country members out of sixty-four are against the measure, and twenty-eight counties out of thirty-two have petitioned against it, this is such abominable corruption that it makes our parliamentary sanction worse than ridiculous. 'I had the honour of offering, for myself, and for a large number of other gentlemen, that, if a minister could by any means win the nation to the measure, and show us even a small preponderance in his favour, we would vote with him. 'So far for politics. I had a charming opportunity of advancing myself and my family, but I did not think it wise to quarrel with myself, and lose my good opinion at my time of life. What did lie in my way for a vote I will not say, but I stated in my place in the House, that I had been offered three thousand guineas for my seat during the few remaining weeks of the session.' In 1817 he writes:--'The influence of the Crown was never so strongly exerted as upon this occasion. It is but justice, however, to Lord Cornwallis and Lord Castlereagh to give it as my opinion, that they began this measure with sanguine hopes that they could convince the reasonable part of the community that a cordial union between the two countries would essentially advance the interests of both. When, however, the ministry found themselves in a minority, and that a spirit of general opposition was rising in the country, a member of the House, who had been long practised in parliamentary intrigues, had the audacity to tell Lord Castlereagh from his place, that "if he did not employ the usual means of persuasion on the members of the House, he would fail in his attempt, and that the sooner he set about it the better." 'This advice was followed; and it is well known what benches were filled with the proselytes that had been made by the convincing arguments which had obtained a majority. 'He went in the spring of 1799 to England, and visited his old friends, Mr. Keir, Mr. Watt, Dr. Darwin, and Mr. William Strutt of Derby. In passing through different parts of the country he saw, and delighted in showing us, everything curious and interesting in art and nature. Travelling, he used to say, was from time to time necessary, to change the course of ideas, and to prevent the growth of local prejudices. 'He went to London, and paid his respects to his friend Sir Joseph Banks, attended the meetings of the Royal Society, and met various old acquaintances whom he had formerly known abroad.' Maria writes:--'In his own account of his earlier life he has never failed to mark the time and manner of the commencement of valuable friendships with the same care and vividness of recollection With which some men mark the date of their obtaining promotion, places, or titles. I follow the example he has set me. 'My father's and Mrs. Edgeworth's families were both numerous, and among such numbers, even granting the dispositions to be excellent and the understandings cultivated, the chances were against their suiting; but, happily, all the individuals of the two families, though of various talents, ages, and characters, did, from their first acquaintance, coalesce. . . . After he had lost such a friend as Mr. Day . . . who could have dared to hope that he should ever have found another equally deserving to possess his whole confidence and affection? Yet such a one it pleased God to give him--and to give him in the brother of his wife. And never man felt more strongly grateful for the double blessing. To Captain Beaufort he became as much attached as he had ever been to Lord Longford or to Mr. Day. 'His father-in-law, Dr. Beaufort, was also particularly agreeable to him as a companion, and helpful as a friend.' Consumption again carried off one of Edgeworth's family: his daughter Elizabeth died at Clifton in August 1800. The Continent, which had been practically closed for some years to travellers, was open in 1802 at the time of the short peace, and Edgeworth gladly availed himself of the opportunity of mixing in the literary and scientific society in Paris, and of showing his wife the treasures of the Louvre--treasures increased by the spoil of other countries. The tour was arranged for the autumn, and Edgeworth was looking forward to visiting Dr. Darwin on the way, when he received a letter begun by the doctor, describing his move from Derby to the Priory, a few miles out of the town, and sending a playful message to Maria: 'Pray tell the authoress that the water nymphs of our valley will be happy to assist her next novel.' A few lines after, the pen had stopped; another hand added the sad news that Dr. Darwin had been taken suddenly ill with fainting fits: he revived and spoke, but died that morning. The sudden death of such an old and valued friend was a great shock to Edgeworth. Some months later, his daughter mentions that, 'in passing through England, we went to Derby, and to the Priory, to which we had been so kindly invited by him who was now no more. The Priory was all stillness, melancholy, and mourning. It was a painful visit, yet not without satisfaction; for my father's affectionate manner seemed to soothe the widow and daughters of his friend, who were deeply sensible of the respect and zealous regard he showed for Dr. Darwin's memory.' CHAPTER 10 Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth, with their daughters Maria and Charlotte, travelled through the Low Countries--'a delightful tour,' Maria writes--and at length reached Paris, where they spent the winter 1802-3. They soon got introductions, through the Abbe Morellet, into that best circle of society, 'which was composed of all that remained of the ancient men of letters, and of the most valuable of the nobility; not of those who had accepted of places from Buonaparte, nor yet of those emigrants who have been wittily and too justly described as returning to France after the Revolution, sans avoir rien appris, ou rien oublie.' . . . 'We felt,' Maria writes, 'the characteristic charms of Parisian conversation, the polish and ease which in its best days distinguished it from that of any other capital. 'During my father's former residence in France, at the time when he was engaged in directing the works of the Rhone and Saone at Lyons, as he mentions in his Memoirs, he wrote a treatise on the construction of mills. He wished that D'Alembert should read it, to verify the mathematical calculations, and for this purpose he had put it into the hands of Morellet. D'Alembert approved of the essay; and my father became advantageously known to Morellet as a man of science, and as one who had gratuitously and honourably conducted a useful work in France. His predominating taste thus continued, as in former times, its influence, was still a connecting link between him and old and new friends. On this and many other occasions he proved the truth of what has been asserted, that no effort is ever lost: his exertions at Lyons in 1772, after an interval of thirty years, now becoming of unexpected advantage to him and to his family at Paris. . . . 'In Paris there is an institution resembling our London Society of Arts, La Societe d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale: of this my father was made a member, and he presented to it the model of a lock of his invention. In getting this executed, he became acquainted with some of the working mechanics in Paris, and had an opportunity of observing how differently work of this kind is carried on there and in Birmingham. Instead of the assemblage of artificers in manufactories, such as we see in Birmingham, each artisan in Paris, working out his own purposes in his own domicile, must in his time "play many parts," and among these many to which he is incompetent, either from want of skill or want of practice: so that, in fact, even supposing French artisans to be of equal ability and industry with English competitors, they are at least a century behind, by thus being precluded from all the miraculous advantages of the division of labour. . . . 'My father had left England with a strong desire to see Buonaparte, and had procured a letter from the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Essex), and had applied to Lord Whitworth, our Ambassador at Paris, who was to present him. But soon after our arrival at Paris, he learned that Buonaparte was preparing the way for becoming Emperor, contrary to the wishes and judgment of the most enlightened part of the French nation. . . . 'My father could no longer consider Buonaparte as a great man, abiding by his principles, and content with the true glory of being the first citizen of a free people; but as one meditating usurpation, and on the point of overturning, for the selfish love of dominion, the liberty of France. With this impression, my father declared that he would not go to the court of a usurper. He never went to his levees, nor would he be presented to him. 'My father had not the presumption to imagine that in a cursory view, during a slight tour, and a residence of four or five months at Paris, he could become thoroughly acquainted with France. Besides, his living chiefly with the select society which I have described precluded the possibility of seeing much of what were called les nouveaux riches. 'The few general observations he made on French society at this time I shall mention. He observed that, among the families of the old nobility, domestic happiness and virtue had much increased since the Revolution, in consequence of the marriages which, after they lost their wealth and rank, had been formed, not according to the usual fashion of old French alliances, but from disinterested motives, from the perception of the real suitability of tempers and characters. The women of this class in general, withdrawn from politics and political intrigue, were more domestic and amiable. . . . 'With regard to literature, he observed that it had considerably degenerated. For the good taste, wit, and polished style which had characterised French literature before the Revolution there was no longer any demand, and but few competent judges remained. The talents of the nation had been forced by circumstances into different directions. At one time, the hurry and necessity of the passing moment had produced political pamphlets and slight works of amusement, formed to catch the public revolutionary taste. At another period, the contending parties, and the real want of freedom in the country, had repressed literary efforts. Science, which flourished independently of politics, and which was often useful and essential to the rulers, had meanwhile been encouraged, and had prospered. The discoveries and inventions of men of science showed that the same positive quantity of talent existed in France as in former times, though appearing in a new form.' The charms of Paris and its society were rudely broken by Edgeworth receiving one morning a visit from a police officer requiring him immediately to attend at the Palais de Justice. Edgeworth was in bed with a cold when this summons came. He writes to Miss Charlotte Sneyd:--'My being ill was not a sufficient excuse; I got up and dressed myself slowly, to gain time for thinking--drank one dish of chocolate, ordered my carriage, and went with my exempt to the Palais de Justice. There I was shown into a parlour, or rather a guard-room, where a man like an under-officer was sitting at a desk. In a few minutes I was desired to walk upstairs into a long narrow room, in different parts of which ten or twelve clerks were sitting at different tables. To one of these I was directed--he asked my name, wrote it on a printed card, and demanding half a crown, presented the card to me, telling me it was a passport. I told him I did not want a passport; but he pressed it upon me, assuring me that I had urgent necessity for it, as I must quit Paris immediately. Then he pointed out to me another table, where another clerk was pleased to place me in the most advantageous point of view for taking my portrait, and he took my written portrait with great solemnity, and this he copied into my passport. I begged to know who was the principal person in the room, and to him I applied to learn the cause of the whole proceeding. He coolly answered that if I wanted to know I must apply to the Grand Juge. To the Grand Juge I drove, and having waited till the number ninety-three was called, the number of the ticket which had been given to me at the door, I was admitted, and the Grand Juge most formally assured me that he knew nothing of the affair, but that all I had to do was to obey. I returned home, and, on examining my passport, found that I was ordered to quit Paris in twenty-four hours. I went directly to our Ambassador, Lord Whitworth, who lived at the extremity of the town: he was ill--with difficulty I got at his secretary, Mr. Talbot, to whom I pointed out that I applied to my Ambassador from a sense of duty and politeness, before I would make any application to private friends, though I believed that I had many in Paris who were willing and able to assist me. The secretary went to the Ambassador, and in half an hour wrote an official note to Talleyrand, to ask the why and the wherefore. He advised me in the meantime to quit Paris, and to go to some village near it--Passy or Versailles. Passy seemed preferable, because it is the nearest to Paris--only a mile and a half distant. Before I quitted Paris I made another attempt to obtain some explanation from the Grand Juge. I could not see him, or even his secretary, for a considerable time; and when at length the secretary appeared, it was only to tell me that I could not see the Grand Juge. "Cannot I write," said I, "to your Grand Juge?" He answered hesitatingly, "Yes." A huissier took in my note, and another excellent one from the friend who was with me, F. D. The huissier returned presently, holding my papers out to me at arm's length--"The Grand Juge knows nothing of this matter." 'I returned home, dined, ordered a carriage to be ready to take me to Passy, wrote a letter to Buonaparte, stating my entire ignorance of the cause of my deportation, and asserting that I was unconnected with any political party. F. D. engaged that the letter should be delivered; and Mrs. E. and Charlotte remaining to settle our affairs at Paris, I set off for Passy with Maria, where my friend F. D. had taken the best lodging he could find for me in the village. Madame G. had offered me her country house at Passy; but though she pressed that offer most kindly we would not accept of it, lest we should compromise our friends. Another friend, Mons. de P, offered his country house, but, for the same reason, this offer was declined. We arrived at Passy about ten o'clock at night, and though a deporte, I slept tolerably well. Before I was up, my friend Mons. de P. was with me--breakfasted with us in our little oven of a parlour --conversed two hours most agreeably. Our other friend, F. D, came also before we had breakfasted, and just as I had mounted on a table to paste some paper over certain deficiencies in the window, enter M. P. and Le B------h. '"Mon ami, ce n'est pas la peine!" cried they both at once, their faces rayonnant de joie. "You need not give yourself so much trouble; you will not stay here long. We have seen the Grand Juge, and your detention arises from a mistake. It was supposed that you are brother to the Abbe Edgeworth--we are to deliver a petition from you, stating what your relationship to the Abbe really is. This shall be backed by an address signed by all your friends at Paris, and you will be then at liberty to return." 'I objected to writing any petition, and at all events I determined to consult my Ambassador, who had conducted himself well towards me. I wrote to Lord Whitworth, stating the facts, and declaring that nothing could ever make me deny the honour of being related to the Abbe Edgeworth. Lord Whitworfh advised me, however, to state the fact that I was not the Abbe's brother. . . . 'No direct answer was received from the First Consul; but perhaps the revocation of the order of the Grand Juge came from him. We were assured that my father's letter had been read by him, and that he declared he knew nothing of the affair; and so far from objecting to any man for being related to the Abbe Edgeworth, he declared that he considered him as a most respectable, faithful subject, and that he wished that he had many such.' Before this unpleasant occurrence Edgeworth had thought of taking a house in Paris for two years and sending for his other children; but he now, in spite of the entreaties of his French friends, altered his plans and resolved to return home. Maria writes:--'He was prudent and decided--had he been otherwise, we might all have been among the number of our countrymen who were, contrary to the law of nations, and to justice and reason, made prisoners in France at the breaking out of the war. We were fortunate in getting safe to free and happy England a short time before war was declared, and before the detention of the English took place. 'My eldest brother had the misfortune to be among those who were detained. His exile was rendered as tolerable as circumstances would permit by the indefatigable kindness of our friends the D' s. But it was an exile of eleven years--from 1803 to 1814--six years of that time spent at Verdun!' CHAPTER 11 Instead of returning at once to Ireland, the Edgeworths went to Edinburgh to visit Henry Edgeworth, whose declining health caused his father much anxiety. Maria writes:--'He mended rapidly while we were at Edinburgh; and this improvement in his health added to the pleasure his father felt in seeing the interest his son had excited among the friends he had made for himself in Edinburgh--men of the first abilities and highest characters, both in literature and science--whom we knew by their works, as did all the world; with some of whom my father had had the honour of corresponding, but to whom he was personally unknown. Imagine the pleasure he felt at being introduced to them by his son, and in hearing Gregory, Alison, Playfair, Dugald Stewart, speak of Henry as if he actually belonged to themselves, and with the most affectionate regard. . . . 'On our journey homewards, in passing through Scotland, we met with much hospitality and kindness, and much that was interesting in the country and in its inhabitants. But the circumstance that remains the most fixed in my recollection, and that which afterwards influenced my father's life the most, happened to be the books we read during our last day's journey. These were the lives of Robertson the historian, and of Reid, which had been just given to us by Mr. Stewart. In the life of Reid there are some passages which struck my father particularly. I recollect at the moment when I was reading to him, his stretching eagerly across from his side of the carriage to mine, and marking the book with his pencil with strong and reiterated marks of approbation. The passages relate to the means which Dr. Reid employed to prevent the decay of his faculties as he advanced in years; to remedy the errors and deficiencies of one failing sense by the increased activity of another, and by the resources of reasoning and ingenuity to resist, as far as possible, or to render supportable, the infirmities of age . . . My father never forgot this passage, and acted on it years afterwards.' It was not Henry who was taken first, but Charlotte, who was 'fresh as a rose' on her first tour abroad. In April 1807 she died of the same disease as her sisters, and about two years after her brother Henry followed her to the grave. It needed a brave heart to bear up under such sorrows, but Edgeworth, though he felt them keenly, would not sink into the lethargy of grief, but roused himself to work for the public good. He was on the board appointed to inquire into the education of the people of Ireland, and two of his papers on the subject were printed in the reports of the Commissioners; he also drew up the plan of a school for Edgeworth Town, which was afterwards carried into execution by his son, Lovell; and at this time he was writing his Memoirs, a task which was interrupted by a severe illness in 1809. He had hardly recovered from this before he was engaged in the Government survey of bogs, and Maria writes:--'It was late in the year, and the weather unfavourable. In laying out and verifying the work of the surveyors employed, he was usually out from daybreak to sunset, often fifteen hours without food, traversing on foot, with great bodily exertion, wastes and deserts of bog, so wet and dangerous as to be scarcely passable at that season, even by the common Irish best used to them. In these bogs there frequently occur great holes, filled with water of the same colour as the bog, or sometimes covered over with a slight surface of the peat heath or grass, called by the common people a shakingscraw. 'In traversing these bogs a man must pick his way carefully, sometimes wading, sometimes leaping from one landing place to another, choosing these cautiously, lest they should not sustain his weight: avoiding certain treacherous green spots on which the unwary might be tempted to set foot, and would sink, never to rise again.' The work was fatiguing, but the open air life seemed to give him new vigour, and his health was reestablished. The work had interested him much, and he believed that an immense tract of bog might be reclaimed. The obstacles he foresaw were want of capital and the danger of litigation. As long as the bogs were unprofitable there was no incitement to a strict definition of boundaries, but if the land was reclaimed many lawsuits would follow. Maria thus describes the difficulties encountered by her father:--'He wished to undertake the improvement of a large tract of bog in his neighbourhood, and for this purpose desired to purchase it from the proprietor; but the proprietor had not the power or the inclination to sell it. My father, anxious to try a decisive experiment on a large scale, proposed to rent it from him, and offered a rent, till then unheard of, for bogland. The proprietor professed himself satisfied to accept the proposal, provided my father would undertake to indemnify him for any expense to which he might be put by future lawsuits concerning the property or boundaries of this bog. He was aware that if he were to give a lease for a long term, even for sixty years, this would raise the idea that the bog would become profitable; and still further, if ever it should be really improved and profitable, it would become an object of contention and litigation to many who might fancy they had claims, which, as long as the bog was nearly without value, they found it not worth while to urge. It was impossible to enter into the insurance proposed, and, consequently, he could not obtain this tract of bog, or further prosecute his plan. The same sort of difficulty must frequently recur. Parts of different estates pass through extensive tracts of bog, of which the boundaries are uncertain. The right to cut the turf is usually vested in the occupiers of adjoining farms; but they are at constant war with each other about boundaries, and these disputes, involving the original grants of the lands, hundreds of years ago, with all subsequent deeds and settlements, appear absolutely interminable. . . . 'It may not be at present a question of much interest to the British public, because no such large decisive experiment as was proposed has yet been tried as to the value and attainableness of the object; but its magnitude and importance are incontestable, the whole extent of peat soil in Ireland exceeding, as it is confidently pronounced, 2,830,000 acres, of which about half might be converted to the general purposes of agriculture.' It was in 1811 that Edgeworth constructed, 'upon a plan of his own invention, a spire for the church of Edgeworth Town. This spire was formed of a skeleton of iron, covered with slates, painted and sanded to resemble Portland stone. It was put together on the ground within the tower of the church, and when finished it was drawn up at once, with the assistance of counterbalancing weights, to the top of the tower, and there to be fixed in its place. 'The novelty of the construction of this spire, even in this its first skeleton state, excited attention, and as it drew towards its completion, and near the moment when, with its covering of slates, altogether amounting to many tons weight, it was to move, or not to move, fifty feet from the ground to the top of the tower, everybody in the neighbourhood, forming different opinions of the probability of its success or failure, became interested in the event. 'Several of my father's friends and acquaintances, in our own and from adjoining counties, came to see it drawn up. Fortunately, it happened to be a very fine autumn day, and the groups of spectators of different ranks and ages, assembled and waiting in silent expectation, gave a picturesque effect to the whole. A bugle sounded as the signal for ascent. The top of the spire appearing through the tower of the church, began to move upwards; its gilt ball and arrow glittered in the sun, while with motion that was scarcely perceptible it rose majestically. Not one word or interjection was uttered by any of the men who worked the windlasses at the top of the tower. 'It reached its destined station in eighteen minutes, and then a flag streamed from its summit and gave notice that all was safe. Not the slightest accident or difficulty occurred.' Maria adds:--'The conduct of the whole had been trusted to my brother William (the civil engineer), and the first words my father said, when he was congratulated upon the success of the work, were that his son's steadiness in conducting business and commanding men gave him infinitely more satisfaction than he could feel from the success of any invention of his own.' Towards the close of 1811 Edgeworth was requested, as he understood, by a committee of the House of Commons on Broad Wheels, to look over and report on a mass of evidence on the subject. This he did, but then found that it was a private request of the chairman, Sir John Sinclair, who begged that the report might be given to the Board of Agriculture. This Edgeworth declined, but wrote instead and presented An Essay on Springs applied to Carts; and in 1813 he published an essay on Roads, and Wheel Carriages. His daughter writes:--'In the course of the drudgery which he went through he received a great counterbalancing pleasure from the following passage, which he chanced to meet with in a letter to the committee, written by a gentleman to whom he was personally a stranger: '"Mr. Edgeworth was the first who pointed out the great benefit of springs in aiding the draught of horses. The subject deserves more attention than it has hitherto met with. No discovery relative to carriages has been made in our time of equal importance; and the ingenious author of it deserves highly of some mark of public gratitude."' Maria adds:--'Those ingenious ideas, which had been but the amusement of youth, as he advanced in life, he turned to public utility: for instance, the mode of conveying secret and swift intelligence, which he had suggested at first only to decide a trifling wager between him and some young nobleman, he afterwards improved into a national telegraph, and through all difficulties and disappointments persevered till it was established. In the same manner, his juvenile amusements with the sailing chariot led to experiments on the resistance of the air, which in more mature years he pursued in the patient spirit of philosophical investigation, and turned to good account for the real business of life, and for the advancement of science. 'On this subject, in the year 1783, he published in the Transactions of the Royal Society (vol. 73) "An Essay on the Resistance of the Air," of which the object, as he states, is to determine the force of the wind upon surfaces of different size and figure, or upon the same surface, when placed in different directions, inclined at different angles, or curved in different arches. . . . After trying several experiments on surfaces of various shapes, he ascertained the difference of resistance in different cases, suggested the probable cause of these variations, and opened a large field for future curious and useful speculation; useful it may be called, as well as curious, because such knowledge applies immediately to the wants and active business of life, to the construction of wind- and water-mills, and to the extensive purposes of navigation. The theory of philosophers and the practice of mechanics and seamen were, and perhaps are still, at variance as to the manner in which sails of wind-mills and of ships should be set. Dr. Hooke, in his day, expressed "his surprise at the obstinacy of seamen in continuing, after what appeared the clearest demonstration to the contrary, to prefer what are called bellying or bunting sails, to such as are hauled tight." The doctor said that he would, at some future time, add the test of experiment to mathematical investigation in support of his theory. 'It is remarkable that this test of experiment, when at length it was applied, confirmed the truth of what the philosopher had reprobated as an obstinate vulgar error. My father, in his Essay on the Resistance of the Air, gives the result of his experiments on a flat and curved surface of the same dimensions, and explains the cause of the error into which Dr. Hooke, M. Parent, and other mathematicians had fallen in their theoretic reasonings. . . . 'It is remarkable that a man of naturally lively imagination and of inventive genius should not, in science, have ever followed any fanciful theory of his own, but that all he did should have been characterised by patient investigation and prudent experiment. . . . 'In science, it is not given to man to finish; to persevere, to advance a step or two, is all that can be accomplished, and all that will be expected by the real philosopher. '"We will endeavour" is the humble and becoming motto of our philosophical society.' CHAPTER 12 In his seventy-first year Edgeworth had a dangerous illness, and though he seemed to recover from it for a time, he never regained his former strength. One great privation was that, from the failure of his sight, he became dependent on others to read and write for him. But his cheerful fortitude did not fail, though he felt that his days were numbered. He had promised to try some private experiments for the Dublin Society, and with the help of his son William he carried out a set of experiments on wheel carriages in April 1815 and in May 1816. Almost his last literary effort was to dictate some pages which he contributed to his daughter Maria's novel Ormond, and he delighted in having the proofsheets read to him and in correcting them. Mrs. Ritchie has given some touching details of his last days in her Introduction to a new edition of Ormond. Maria writes:--'The whole of Moriaty's history, and his escape from prison, were dictated without any alteration, or hesitation of a word, to Honora and me. This history Mr. Edgeworth heard from the actual hero of it, Michael Dunne, whom he chanced to meet in the town of Navan, where he was living respectably. He kept a shop where Mr. Edgeworth went to purchase some boards, and observing something very remarkable about the man's countenance, he questioned him as they were looking at the lumber in his yard, and Dunne readily told his tale almost in the very words used by Moriaty. . . . Mr. Edgeworth also wrote the meeting between Moriaty and his wife when he jumps out of the carriage the moment he hears her voice.' Edgeworth kept his intellectual faculties to the last. 'To the last they continued clear, vigorous, energetic; and to the last were exerted in doing good, and in fulfilling every duty, public and private. . . . 'In the closing hours of his life his bodily sufferings subsided, and in the most serene and happy state, he said, before he sank to that sleep from which he never wakened: '"I die with the soft feeling of gratitude to my friends and submission to the God who made me."' He died the 13th of June 1817. It may be thought to be an easy task to make an abridgment of a biography, but in some ways it is almost as difficult as it is for the sketcher to choose what he will put into his picture and yet preserve a due proportion and give a faithful idea of the whole scene before him. I have tried to give such portions of the Memoirs as will present the many-sided character of R. L. Edgeworth in relation to his scientific, literary, and educational work, and in relation to his position as a landlord, a father, and a friend. He was a singular instance of great mental activity with little ambition; of a genial nature in his own family circle and among his friends, he withdrew from the multitude, and refused to lower his standard of cultivated intercourse in order to win favour with coarser natures. He is chiefly remembered now as an educational reformer and as the guide of Maria Edgeworth in the earlier stages of her literary career. What she achieved was in great part due to her father's judicious training and encouragement. A little more ambition and the spur of poverty might have made Edgeworth better known as an inventor of useful machines: it is curious to remark how nearly he invented the bicycle. He saw the advantage that light railways would be to Ireland, but the breath of mechanical life, steam, as a power, he did not foresee. He might have written a book on 'The Domestic Life,' so fully had he mastered the secrets of a happy home. He was naturally passionate, but had trained himself to be on his guard against his temper, and was always anxious to improve and to correct any bad habit or fault: even in old age he was constantly on the watch lest bodily infirmities should lead to moral deterioration. He was not too proud to own when he had made mistakes, but used the experience he had gained, and carefully studied his own character and the circumstances which had been most beneficial in forming it. He controlled his expenses as prudently as his temper, and would not allow his inventive faculties to lead him into unjustifiable outlays. His daughter mentions that 'when he was a youth of nineteen, an old gentleman, who saw him passing by his window, said of him, judging by the liveliness of his manner and appearance, "There goes a young fellow who will in a few years dissipate all the fortune his prudent father has been nursing for him his whole life." 'The prophecy was, by a kind neighbour, repeated to him, and, as I have heard him say, it made such an impression as tended considerably to prevent its own accomplishment. 'He acquired the habit of calculating and forming estimates most accurately. He not only estimated what every object of fancy and taste would cost, but he accustomed himself to consider what the actual enjoyment of the indulgence would be. ... He upon all occasions carefully separated the idea of the pleasure of possession from that of contemplating any object of taste.' She also mentions that 'he observed, that the happiness that people derive from the cultivation of their understandings is not in proportion to the talents and capacities of the individual, but is compounded of the united measure of these, and of the use made of them by the possessor; this must include good or ill temper, and other moral dispositions. Some with transcendent talents waste these in futile projects; others make them a source of misery, by indulging that overweening anxiety for fame which ends in disappointment, and excites too often the powerful passions of envy and jealousy; others, too humble, or too weak, fret away their spirits and their life in deploring that they were not born with more abilities. But though so many lament the want of talents, few actually derive as much happiness as they might from the share of understanding which they possess. My father never wasted his time in deploring the want of that which he could by exertion acquire. Nor did he suffer fame in any pursuit to be his first object.' We feel that we are in the moral atmosphere of Paley and Butler when she adds:--'Far beyond the pleasures of celebrity, or praise in any form, he classed self-approbation and benevolence: these he thought the most secure sources of satisfaction in this world.' This is the spirit of the Eighteenth Century, the clear cold tone of the moral philosopher, not the enthusiastic impulse of the fervid theologian, of Pusey, Keble, or Newman. One star does indeed differ from another in glory, but all give brilliance to our firmament and raise our thoughts from earth. Such a life as Richard Edgeworth's seems to me to be more instructive than even that excellent moral guide-book written by Sir John Lubbock, The Uses of Life, because abstract maxims take less hold of uncultivated or unanalytical minds than the portrait of a man of flesh and blood. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress reaches many hearts which are unmoved by an ordinary sermon, and Edgeworth's life was indeed a progress, a constant striving not only to improve himself but to help others onward in the right way. He showed what a good landlord could do in Ireland, and what a good father can do in binding a family in happy union. 
7789	----	MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE BY GEORGE MOORE CONTENTS APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS I. SPRING IN LONDON II. FLOWERING NORMANDY III. A WAITRESS IV. THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN V. LA BUTTE VI. SPENT LOVES VII. NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE VIII. THE LOVERS OF ORELAY IX. IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS X. A REMEMBRANCE XI. BRING IN THE LAMP XII. SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON XIII. RESURGAM APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS [_The_ APOLOGIA _which follows needs, perhaps, a word of explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore's text--that is as delightful, as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever written--but to explain why it was written and why it is published. When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of Schopenhauer, "flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East," first read and signified his pride in being able to publish these "Memoirs," the passages now consigned to "the late Lord ----'s library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his_ Mayflower _ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet in parts so--what shall we say?--so full of the "Wisdom of the East" that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake. And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called publishers, gave way on condition that this _APOLOGIA_ should appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration of an Ibsen comma, and if the _Mayflower_ "weeds" mere instrumental in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew_.--THE PUBLISHER.] Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs. Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question, and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life" and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they depict him. "Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander. "Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I _do_ want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?" * * * * * The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart, nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea. "And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads, deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth, that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums; think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter again I read: "I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs' a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man? Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion. You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of wider range." The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty, hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him ... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him. But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word "law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the "Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the reader shall form his own estimate. "I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you. "'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No, with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there are Victorian back parlors and paper roses. "You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and _vice versa_. And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so? And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down, deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?" His letter dropped from my hand, and I sat muttering, "How superficially men think!" How little they trouble themselves to discover the truth! While declaring that truth is all important, they accept any prejudice and convention they happen to meet, fastening on to it like barnacles. How disappointing is that passage about the murderer, the sensualist, the liar, and the coward; but of what use would it be to remind my correspondent of Judith who went into the tent of Holofernes to lie with him, and after the love feast drove a nail into the forehead of the sleeping man. She is in Scripture held up to our admiration as a heroine, the saviour of our nation. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath, yet who regards Charlotte Corday as anything else but a heroine? In Russia men know that the fugitives lie hidden in the cave, yet they tell the Cossack soldiers they have taken the path across the hill--would my correspondent reprove them and call them liars? I am afraid he has a lot of leeway to make up, and it is beyond my power to help him. Picking up his letter I glanced through it for some mention of "Esther Waters," for in answer to the question if I could recommend him to any book of mine in which I viewed life--I cannot bring myself to transcribe that tag from Matthew Arnold--I referred him to "Esther Waters," saying that a critic had spoken of it as a beautiful amplification of the beatitudes. Of the book he makes no mention in his letter, but he writes: "There is a challenging standard of life in your book which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the average man." The idea besets him, and he refers to it again in the last paragraph; he says: "You see, you are a preacher, not merely an artist." And very likely he is right; there is a messianic aspect in my writings, and I fell to thinking over "Esther Waters"; and reading between the lines for the first time, I understood that it was that desire to standardize morality that had caused the poor girl to be treated so shamefully. Once Catholicism took upon itself to torture and then to burn all those it could lay hands upon who refused to believe with its doctrines, and now in the twentieth century Protestantism persecutes those who act or think in opposition to its moralities. Even the saintly Mrs. Barfield did not dare to keep Esther; but if she sent her servant away, she spoke kindly, giving her enough money to see her through her trouble; there are good people among Christians. The usual Christian attitude would be to tell Esther that she must go into a reformatory after the birth of her child, for the idea of punishment is never long out of the Christian's thoughts. It is not necessary to recapitulate here how Esther, escaping from the network of snares spread for her destruction, takes refuge in a workhouse, and lives there till her child is reared; how she works fifteen hours a day in a lodging house, sleeping in corners of garrets, living upon insufficient food; or how, after years of struggle, she meets William, now separated from his wife, and consents to live with him that her child may have a father. For this second "transgression," so said a clergyman in a review of the book, Esther could not be regarded as a moral woman. His moral sense, dwarfed by doctrine, did not enable him to see that the whole evil came out of standard morality and the whole good out of the instinct incarnate in her; and he must have read the book without perceiving its theme, the revelation in the life of an outcast servant girl of the instinct on which the whole world rests. Not until writing these lines did I ever think of "Esther Waters" as a book of doctrine; but it is one, I see that now, and that there is a messianic aspect in my writings. My correspondent did well to point that out, and no blame attaches to him because he seems to fail to see that I may be an admirable moralist while depreciating Christian morality and advocating a return to Nature's. He belonged to the traditions yesterday, today he is among those who are seekers, and to-morrow I doubt not he will be among those prone to think that perhaps Christianity is, after all, retrograde. His lips will curl contemptuously to-morrow when he hears the cruelty of the circus denounced by men who would, if they were allowed, relight the bon fires of the Inquisition; ... he is a Protestant, I had forgotten. Gladiators have begun to appear to us less cruel than monks, and everybody who can think has begun to think that some return to pagan morality is desirable. That is so; awaking out of the great slumber of Christianity, we are all asking if the qualities which once we deemed our exclusive possession have not been discovered among pagans--pride, courage, and heroism. Our contention has become that no superiority is claimed in any respect but one; it appears that it must be admitted that Christians are more chaste than pagans, at all events that chastity flourishes among Christian communities as it has never flourished among pagan. The Christian's boast is that all sexual indulgence outside of the marriage bed is looked upon as sinful, and he would seem to think that if he proclaims this opinion loudly, its proclamation makes amends for many transgressions of the ethical law. All he understands is the law; nothing of the subtler idea that the ethical impulse is always invading the ethical law finds a way into his mind. Women are hurried from Regent Street to Vine Street, and his conscience is soothed by these raids; the owners of the houses in which these women live are fined, and he congratulates himself that vice is not licensed in England, that, in fact, its existence is unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human grief, he mutters "how very sad!" But the assurance that the women are wretched and despised soothes his conscience, and he remembers if he has not been able to abolish prostitution, he has at all events divested it of all "glamour." It would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of men and women as casual as that of animals. "But what do you wish--you would not have vice respected, would you?" "What you call vice was once respected and honored, and the world was as beautiful then as now, and as noble men lived in it. In many ways the world was more moral than when your ideas began to prevail." He asks me to explain, and I tell him that with the degradation of the courtesan the moral standard has fallen, for as we degrade her we disgrace the act of love. We have come to speak of it as part of our lower nature, permissible, it is true, if certain conditions are complied with, but always looked upon askance; and continuing the same strain of argument, I tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have been living ever since. In becoming _hetairae_, Aspasia, Lais, Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of Minerva and Zeus. The words of Blake come into my mind, "the daring of the lion or the submission of the ox." With these words I should have headed my letter to the secretary of the charitable institution, and I should have told him that many books which he would regard as licentious are looked upon by me as sacred. "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "the golden book of spirit and sense," Swinburne has called it, I have always looked upon as a sacred book from the very beginning of my life. It cleansed me of the belief that man has a lower nature, and I learned from it that the spirit and the flesh are equal, "that earth is as beautiful as heaven, and that perfection of form is virtue." "Mademoiselle de Maupin" was a great purifying influence, a lustral water dashed by a sacred hand, and the words are forever ringing in my ear, "by exaltation of the spirit and the flesh thou shalt live." This book would be regarded by my correspondent as he regards my "Memoirs," and its publication has been interdicted in England. How could it be permitted to circulate in a country in which the kingdom of heaven is (in theory) regarded as more important than the kingdom of earth? A few pages back the idea came up under my pen that the aim of practical morality was to render illicit love as unattractive as possible, and I suppose, though he has never thought the matter out, the Christian moralist would regard Gautier as the most pernicious of writers, for his theme is always praise of the visible world, of all that we can touch and see; and in this book art and sex are not estranged. I have often wondered if the estrangement of the twain so noticeable in English literature is not the origin of this strange belief that bodily love is part of our lower nature. Our appreciation of the mauve flush dying in the west has been indefinitely heightened by descriptions seen in pictures and read in poems, and I cannot but think that if the lover's exaltation before the curve of his mistress's breast had not been forbidden, the ugly thought that the lover's ardor is inferior to the poet's would never have obtained credence. There is but one energy, and the vital fluid, whether expended in love or in a poem, is the same. The poet and the lover are creators, they participate and carry on the great work begun billions of years ago when the great Breath breathing out of chaos summoned the stars into being. But why do I address myself like this to the average moralist? How little will he understand me! In the Orelay adventure which horrified him there was an appreciation of beauty which he has, I am afraid, rendered himself incapable of. Myself and Doris were spiritual gainers by the Orelay adventure, Doris's rendering of "The Moonlight Sonata," till she went to Orelay, was merely brilliant and effective; and have not all the critics in England agreed that the story in which I relate her contains some of the best pages of prose I have written? But why talk of myself when there is Wagner's experience to speak about? Did he not write to Madame Wasendonck, "I owe you Tristan for all eternity"? She has not left any written record of her debt to Wagner, perhaps because she could not find words to give the reader any idea how great it was. Histories of human civilization there are in abundance, but I do not know of any history of the human intelligence. But when this comes to be written--if it ever should come to be written--the writer will hesitate, at least I can imagine him hesitating, how much of the genius of artists he would be justified in tracing back to sexual impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise beliefs on this point he confessed that he could not allow an author more than half an hour once a year with his beloved; he placed no restriction, however, on correspondence, "for that helped to form a style." When Gautier mentioned the names of certain great men whose lives offered a striking refutation of this theory, Balzac answered they would have written better if they had lived chastely. Gautier seems to have left the question there, and so will we, remarking only that Balzac was prone to formulating laws out of his single experience. I remember having written, or having heard somebody say, "in other writers we discover this or that thing, but everything exists in Balzac." And in his conversation with Gautier we do not find him praising chastity as a virtue, but extolling the results that may be gotten from chastity as a Yogi might. It is said that English missionaries in India sometimes drive out in their pony chaises to visit a holy man who has left his womenfolk, plentiful food, and a luxurious dwelling for a cave in some lonely ravine. The pony chaise only takes the parson to the mouth of the ravine, and leaving his wife and children in charge of his servant, the parson ascends the rocky way on foot, meeting, perchance, a fat peasant priest from Maynooth bent on the same mission as himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously he would raise his eyes when he gathered gradually from their discourse that his visitors believed that chastity was incumbent upon all men. "But all men are not the same," he would answer, if he answered his visitors; "I dwell in solitude and in silence, and am chaste, and live upon the rice that the pious leave on the rocks for me, but I do not regard chastity and abstinence as possessed of any inherent merits; as virtues, they are but a means to an end. How would you impose chastity upon all men, since every man brings a different idea into the world with him? There are men who would die if forced to live chaste lives, and there are men who would choose death rather than live unchaste, and many a woman if she were forced to live with one husband would make him very unhappy, whereas if she lived with two men she would make them both supremely happy. But the news has reached me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other. The sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man, rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break forth again the next day. Schopenhauer has a fine phrase, one that has haunted my mind these many years, that the follies of the West flatten against the sublime wisdom of the East like bullets fired against a cliff. How can it be otherwise? For when we were naked savages the Brahmans were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the _Mayflower_ sailed. It would have been better if Columbus had delayed his discovery for, let us say, a thousand years. I am afraid the _Mayflower_ carried over a great many intellectual weeds which have caught root and flourished exceedingly in your States--Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A letter arrived from Washington some two or three months ago. The writer was a lady who used to write to me on all subjects under the sun; about fifteen years ago we had ceased to write to each other, so she began her letter, not unnaturally, by speaking of the surprise she guessed her handwriting would cause me. She had broken the long silence, for she had been reading "The Lake," and had been much interested in the book. It would have been impolite to write to me without alluding to the aesthetic pleasure the book had given her, but her interest was mainly a religious one. About five years ago she had become a Roman Catholic, she was writing a book on the subject of her conversion, and would like to find out from me why I had made Father Gogarty's conversion turn upon his love of woman, "for it seems to me clear, unless I have misunderstood your book, that you intended to represent Gogarty as an intellectual man." It is difficult to trace one's motives back, but I remember the irritation her letter caused me, and how I felt it would not be dignified for me to explain; my book was there for her to interpret or misinterpret, as she pleased; added to which her "conversion" to Rome was an annoying piece of news. Fifteen years ago she was an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman, if photographs do not lie, and it was disagreeable for me to think of her going on her knees in a confessional, receiving the sacraments, wearing scapulars, trying to persuade herself that she believed in the Pope's indulgences. She must now be middle-aged, but the decay of physical beauty is not so sad a spectacle as the mind's declension. "She began to think," I said, "of another world only when she found herself unable to enjoy this one any longer; weariness of this world produces what the theologians call 'faith.' How often have we heard the phrase 'You will believe when you are dying'? She would have had," I said, "Father Gogarty leave his church for doctrinal rather than natural reasons, believing scrolls to be more intellectual than the instincts; Father Gogarty poring over some early edition of the Scriptures in his little house on the hilltop, reading by the light of the lamp at midnight and deciding that he would go out of his parish because, according to recent exegesis, a certain verset in the Gospel had been added three hundred years after the death of Christ." I fell to thinking how dry, common, and uninteresting the tale would be had it been written on these doctrinal lines. Carlyle said that Cardinal Newman had the brain of a half-grown rabbit, and he was right; Newman never got further than a scroll, and man must think with his body, as well as with his brain. To think well the whole man must think, and it seems to me that Father Gogarty thought in this complete way. Rose Leicester revealed to him the enchantment and the grace of life, and his quest became life. Had it been Hose Leicester herself the story would have merely been a sensual incident. The instinct to go rose up within him, he could not tell how or whence it came, and he went as the bird goes, finding his way toward a country where he had never been, led as the bird is led by some nostalgic instinct. And I do not doubt that he found life, whether in the form of political or literary ambition or in some other woman who would remind him of the woman he had lost; perhaps he found it in all these things, perhaps in none. Told as I told it the story seems to me a true and human one, and one that might easily occur in these modern days; much more easily than the story my correspondent would have had me write. The story of a priest abandoning his parish for theological reasons is not an improbable one, but I think such a story would be more typical of the sixteenth century, when men were more interested in the authenticity of the Biblical texts than they are in the twentieth. The Bible has been sifted again and again; its history is known, every word has been weighed, and it is difficult to imagine the most scrupulous exegetist throwing a search light into any unexplored corner. Even Catholic scholarship, if Loisy can be regarded as a Catholic, has abandoned the theory that the gospels were written by the Apostles. The earliest, that of Mark, was written sixty years after the death of Christ, and it is the only one for which any scholar claims the faintest historical value. With this knowledge of history in our possession belief has become in modern times merely a matter of temperament, entirely dissociated from the intellect. Some painter once said that Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the intellect--it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the Pope's indulgences. The two great enemies of religion, as the clerics know well, are the desire to live and the desire to know. We find this in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures ate of these different fruits. God's comprehension of the danger of the tree of life is not wonderful, but his foreseeing of the danger of the tree of knowledge was extraordinary foreseeing, for very little of the fruit of this tree had been eaten at the time the text was written. All through the Middle Ages the clerics strove to keep men from it with tortures and burnings at the stake, and they were so anxiously striving for success in protecting their flocks from this tree that they allowed the sheep to wander, the rams to follow the ewes, and to gambol as they pleased. But the efforts of the clerics were vain. There were rams who renounced the ewes, and the succulent herbage that grows about the tree of life, for the sake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; all the fences that the clerics had erected were broken down one by one; and during the nineteenth century a great feast was held under the tree. But after every feast there are always ailing stomachs; these denouncing the feast go about in great depression of spirit, surfeited feasters, saying the branches of the tree have been plucked bare; others complain they have eaten bitter fruit. This is the moment for the prowling cleric. Hell is remote, it has been going down in the world for some time, and biology, if no conclusions be drawn, serves the clerical purpose almost as well. "The origins of existence are humble enough, my son, but think of the glorious heritage," and the faint-hearted sheep is folded again.... The tree of life is more abundant; whenever a fruit is plucked another instantly takes its place, and all the efforts of the clerics are now directed to keep their flocks from this tree. "Back to the tree of knowledge!" they cry. "Hu! Hu! Hu! Both trees," they mutter among themselves, "are accursed, but this one, from which sweet fruit may always be plucked, is the worser." And they collect together in groups to pass censure on their predecessors. "My predecessors were infallible fools," cries the Pope, "to have permitted praise of this fatal tree, wasting their energies on such men as Bruno, who said the earth was round, and Galileo, whom they forced to say he was mistaken when he said the earth moves. A pretty set of difficulties they have involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been written. Away with him who says that the earth is as beautiful as heaven," and Gautier's phrase, _"Moi, je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu,"_ has become the heresy more intolerable than any other to the modern cleric, and to me and to all the ardent and intellectual spirits of my generation a complete and perfect expression of doctrine. To some it will always seem absurd to look to Gautier rather than to a Bedouin for light. Nature produces certain attitudes of mind, and among these is an attitude which regards archbishops as more serious than pretty women. These will never be among my disciples. So leaving them in full possession of the sacraments, I pass on. My generation was in sympathy with "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and it did more than to reveal and clarify the ideas we were seeking. It would be vain for me, as for any other man, to attempt to follow the course of an idea and to try to determine its action upon life. Perhaps the part of the book which interested us the least was that very part which would be read aloud in court if a prosecution were attempted: I am alluding to the scene when Mademoiselle de Maupin comes into Albert's room. This scene was, however, inevitable, and could not be omitted, for does it not contain that vision of beauty which Albert had been seeking and which was vouchsafed to him for a little while? Never did he see Mademoiselle de Maupin afterwards, she was but a phantom of his own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by incident. So long as we confine ourselves to theory we are unmolested. But these are subtleties which do not trouble the minds of the members of vigilance associations, the men and women who gather together in back parlors with lead pencils to mark out passages which they consider "un-Kur-istean" (a good strong accent on the second syllable). Their thoughts pursue beaten tracks. Books like "Mademoiselle de Maupin" they hold would act directly on the temperament, and we know that they do not do this, we know that the things of the intellect belong to the intellect and the things of the flesh to the flesh. Were it otherwise Rose Leicester, the pretty school mistress, might have been left out of my story entitled "The Lake," and her place taken by a book. My lady correspondent, it will be remembered, was in favor of some doctrinal difficulty. My second correspondent, the secretary of the charitable institution, would have chosen as the cause of Father Oliver's flight a sensual book. His choice might have been Burton's "Arabian Nights"; better still Casanova's "Memoirs," for this is a book written almost entirely with the senses; the intellect hardly ever intrudes itself; and instead of an emaciated priest poring over a dusty folio we should have had an inflamed young man curled up in an armchair reading eagerly, walking up and down the room from time to time, unable to contain himself, and eventually throwing the book aside, he would find his way down to the lake. These two versions of "The Lake," as it might have been written by my correspondents, will convince, I think, almost anyone, even them, that the desire of life which set Father Gogarty free could have been inspired only by a woman's personality. It was not necessary that he should go after the woman herself--but that point has already been explained. What concerns us now to understand is how the strange idea could have come into men's minds that literature is a more potent influence than life itself. The solving of this problem has beguiled many an hour, but the solution seems as far away as ever, and I have never got nearer than the supposition that perhaps this fear of literature is a survival of the very legitimate fear that prevailed in the Middle Ages against writing. In my childhood I remember hearing an old woman say that writing was an invention of the devil, and what an old woman believed forty years ago in outlying districts was almost the universal opinion of the Middle Ages. Denunciations and burnings of books were frequent, and ideas die slowly, finding a slow extinction many generations after the reason for their existence has ceased. In the famous trial of Gille de Rais we have it on record that the Breton baron was asked by his ecclesiastical judges if pagan literature had inspired the strange crimes of which he was accused, if he had read of them in--I have forgotten the names of the Latin authors mentioned, but I remember Gille de Rais' quite simple answer that his own heart had inspired the crimes. Whereupon the judges not unnaturally were shocked, for the conclusion was forced upon them that if Gille's confession were true they were not trying a man who had been perverted by outward influence but one who had been born perverted. Who then was responsible for his crimes? Lunacy sometimes in these modern days serves as a scapegoat, but the knowledge of lunacy in the fifteenth century was not so complete as it is now and the judges preferred to believe that Gille was lying. And about ten years ago London found itself in the same moral quandary. Three or four little boys were discovered to have planned the murder of one of their comrades--sixpence, I think, was the object of the murder; not one was over eight, yet they planned the crime skillfully and very nearly succeeded in avoiding detection. To credit these little boys with instinctive crime was intolerable, and just as in the Middle Ages a scapegoat had to be found. Apuleius and his Ass were out of the question, but the little boys admitted having read penny dreadfuls; London breathed again, the way now was clear, these newspapers must be prosecuted, and this recrudescence of wickedness in the heart of a little boy would never be heard of again. A little later or maybe it was a little earlier, I relate these things in the order in which they come into my mind, the London Vigilance Association instituted a prosecution against Mr. Henry Vizetelly, a man of letters and the publisher of Zola's novels. With the exception of Mr. Robert Buchanan and myself not a single man of letters could be found to speak in Mr. Vizetelly's defense. Everybody urged some excuse, his wife was ill, his children were at the seaside and he had to go down to see them, or that he had never cared much about naturalistic literature; whereas, if the prosecution had been directed against something romantic, etc.--Stranger still is the fact that it was almost impossible to find a counsel willing to defend Mr. Vizetelly. One man threw up the case, giving as his reason that he would have to read the books, another said that it would be impossible to adequately defend Mr. Vizetelly's case because no one could say what one had a right to put into a book. This remark seemed to me at the time contemptible, but there was more in it than I thought, for will it be believed that when the case came into court the judge ruled that the fact that standard writers had availed themselves of a great deal of license could not be taken as a proof that such license was permissible? Two wrongs do not make a right he said. In these circumstances perhaps counsel was wise to tell Mr. Vizetelly to plead guilty to having published an indecent libel; but the advice seemed so cruel that, justly or unjustly, I suspect the lawyer of a wish to escape the odium that would have attached to him if he had defended a book accused of immorality. The old man was heavily fined. On going out of court he set to work to have the books revised, spending hundreds of pounds having the plates altered, but the Vigilance Association attacked him again, and this time they succeeded in killing him. Mr. Vizetelly was over seventy years of age when he went to prison, and the shame, anxiety, and three months of prison life killed him. Five years afterwards the Authors' Society, who would not say a word in his favor, voted a great banquet for Zola when he came to London. Zola received every homage that could be paid to a man of letters. The Vigilance Association raised no protest, and I do not blame them. None would have been heard. But while the banquets were held and the speeches were published in the newspapers some of the members of the Association must have meditated sadly on the futility of their efforts and the death of Mr. Vizetelly. It requires a heavy blow of a very heavy mallet to get anything into some people's heads, and nothing short of the reception that was given to Zola could have affected the minds of the Vigilance Association. The significance of the judge's words that the fact that classical writers had availed themselves of a certain license could not be taken as proof that such license was permissible escaped them altogether, for some time afterwards the question of immorality in literature arose again--I have forgotten the circumstances of this case--but I remember that Mr. Coote, the secretary of the Association, was asked if Shakespeare had not written many very reprehensible passages. Mr. Coote was obliged to admit that he had, and when asked why the Association he represented did mot proceed against Shakespeare he answered because Shakespeare wrote beautifully. A strangely immoral doctrine, for if the license of expression that Shakespeare availed himself of be harmful, Shakespeare should be prosecuted; that he wrote beautifully is no defense whatever. Life comes before literature, and the Vigilance Association lays itself open to a charge of neglect of duty by not proceeding at once against Shakespeare and against all those who have indulged in the same license of expression. The members and their secretary have indeed set themselves a stiff job, but they must not shrink from it if they would avoid shocking other people's moral sense by exhibiting themselves in the light of mere busybodies with a taste for what boys and old men speak of as "spicy bits." Proceedings will have to be taken against all the literature that Mr. Coote believes to be harmful (I accept him as the representative of the ideas of his Association), and the plea must not be raised again that because a reprehensible passage is well written it should be acquitted. We must consider the question impartially. It is true that a magistrate may be found presiding at Bow Street who will refuse to issue a warrant against the publishers, let us say of Byron, Sterne, the Restoration, and the Elizabethan dramatists. The Association will have to risk the refusal; but I would not discourage the Association from the adventure. It must not abandon the tope of finding a magistrate who, anxious to prove himself no moral laggard, will do all that is asked of him. A very pretty selection of "spicy bits" can be picked from "Don Juan," and toward this compilation every member, male and female, might contribute. The reading of these selections in Bow Street in a crowded court would prove quite a literary entertainment, and if the magistrate refused to issue a warrant he could only do so on the pretext that the book had been published a long while, a pretext which can hardly be held to be more valid than the pretext put forward by Mr. Coote for not prosecuting Shakespeare. Of one thing only would I warn the Society which I seem to be taking under my wing, and that is, even if it should succeed in interdicting two-thirds of English literature its task will still be only half accomplished. The newspaper question will still have to be faced. Books are relatively expensive, but the newspaper can be bought for a halfpenny, and it will be admitted that no author is as indecent as the common reporter. The reader thinks that I am going to draw his attention to some celebrated divorce case, an account of which was reported in full in the columns of some daily paper under a large heading "Painful Details," the details being the account the chambermaid gave the outraged husband of--I will spare my reader. About fifteen years ago I was asked if I would care to go over to ---- College to see the sports. We walked across the downs, and while watching the racing I was accosted by the head master, who asked me if I would like to see the college. The sports were more interesting than refectories and dormitories, but it seemed a little churlish to refuse and we went together. No doubt we visited the kitchens and the chapel, but what I remember was a long hall wainscoted with oak and furnished with oak tables and chairs and benches, In this hall there were some thirty or forty boys, of ages varying from twelve to eighteen, reading the newspapers, reading the reports of the Oscar Wilde trial; each daily paper contained three or four columns of it. I asked the head master if it were right to allow the boys to read such reports and he answered that lately the newspapers contained a great deal of objectionable matter, "But how am I to keep the daily papers out of the college?" Now I am not easily scandalized, but I could not help feeling that a grave scandal was being committed in allowing these boys to read the newspapers during the week of that trial. But if you admit the newspapers one day how can you forbid them on another occasion? And while appreciating the head master's difficulty I walked out into the open air unable to take any further interest in the sports. Nor has time obliterated anything of the shame I felt that day. I don't want to make a fuss, I don't want to pose as a moralist, but I cannot help thinking that while newspapers continue to be published, the Vigilance Society need not trouble lest certain books should fall into the hands of young people. My correspondent forgot that thousands of newspapers are published to-day when he wrote to me saying that my book roused sensuality. I am afraid I omitted the passage in which these words occur, fearing to burden my article with quotation. Here it is: "The perusal of the episodes (Doris' Orelay experiences) does certainly not ennoble me, it rouses sensuality, it lowers woman from a friend and helpmeet into a convenience and a minister to pleasure. I am less able and less willing to think 'high' after your book; poetry is distasteful, art is narrowed, I look out for the licentious, the suggestive, the low, and the mean; and don't you? You seem in passage after passage to be world-weary in a sense that no sane man ought to be, sated, disgusted, tired of life--is it not so? You see I speak from what I am sure you will regard as a narrow platform, my ideals are certainly not yours but I am simply and frankly curious as to the ultimates in your book and in yourself." Let us suppose now that the Vigilance Association after a sharp crusade has succeeded in redeeming our literature from all reprehensible matter, and flushed with success has attacked the newspapers and obtained an interdiction against the publication of all reports of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. And having extended our imagination so far we may presume as the sequence a world of such highly developed moral susceptibilities that Miss Austen's novels are beginning to cause uneasiness. Miss Austen's novels are still permitted, but in current literature nothing is said that would lead the reader to suppose that men and women are not of the same sex. But men and women still continue to meet and hold conversation. Only some advanced members of the Association are in favor of that complete separation of the sexes which obtains in Ireland in the rural districts. In the imaginary time of which I am writing the Association has only obtained complete control over literature. The theaters are either closed or given over to the representation of plays on religious subjects; but private life has not been invaded by the Puritan missionary, and waltz tunes are still heard and figures seen whirling past lighted windows in Grosvenor Square and Fifth Avenue. Mr. Coote has at this time become a moderate, he is no longer among the progressives, and is in danger of losing his post, so I have no difficulty in imagining what he would do in such a dilemma. He would disguise himself as a waiter and at the next meeting of the Society tell how he had until now showed some reluctance to--the sentence would be a difficult one to finish, perhaps Mr. Coote would break off and say--reluctance to put restraint on the action of men and women as long as they kept within their own doors, but after what he has seen, he finds himself obliged to pass from the moderates to the progressives. What has Mr. Coote seen. How would he tell his tale? He would tell of the length and the breadth of the ball room, of the parquet floor usually covered with an aubusson carpet but the carpet had been lifted and the gilded furniture taken away; the windows and the recesses had been filled with flowers, and to keep these fresh, great blocks of ice had been placed in the niches. He would tell of the lighting arrangements, for are not flowers and lights incentives to immorality? But his descriptions of the roses and the lilies would only lead up to his descriptions of the shameless animality that came up the staircase between twelve and one. A half-naked lady, the hostess, stood at the head of the stairs receiving her guests with smiles and words of welcome. The dresses the women wore resembled the dress worn by the hostess; young and old alike went about their pleasure with necks and bosoms and arms uncovered, and he saw these undressed creatures slip into the arms of men who whirled them round and round; it was but a whirling of silk ankles and a shuffling of glazed shoes; and every now and then the men and women looked into each other's eyes, and the whole scene was reflected shamelessly in tall mirrors. Notwithstanding the fact that most of Mr. Coote's time was spent behind the buffet serving out ices, he nevertheless contrived to find a spare moment for investigation. On the pretext of seeking a lady who had dropped a handkerchief he had crossed the ball room and was therefore in a position to give an accurate account of the waltzes he had heard, dulcet, undulating, capricious measures, far more provocative than Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" which Tolstoy has denounced. The lady that Mr. Coote sought was not in the ball room, and so he had an opportunity of investigating all the retiring rooms, and I need not describe the pensive and shocked faces that listened to his descriptions of the shady nooks. Sometimes it was a screen, sometimes it was a palm that was employed to hide the couple from observation. Mr. Coote at last discovered the owner of the handkerchief in one of those shady nooks, she was there with a gentleman.... Mr. Coote, of course, would refuse to relate what he saw, he would hesitate, but the members of his Association would insist upon knowing everything, and he would at last confess: "Well, the gentleman had kissed the lady on the point of her shoulder." From this scandalous incident he would pass to tell all that he remembered of the conversation he had heard at the table round which he had worked till nearly four o'clock in the morning handing cutlets, chicken patties, and other delicacies, the names of which he was not acquainted with. Mr. Coote's description of what he saw may be ingenuous, but is his description untrue? And when Mr. Coote finished up his speech as I imagine him finishing it, by stating that the dancing, the music, the dresses, the wines, and the meats were arranged and learnedly chosen for one purpose and one only, the stimulation of sexual passion, I cannot imagine anyone accusing him of having spoken an untruth. Mr. Coote added that no one went to the ball for the pleasure of the conversation--he was convinced that old and young derived their pleasure, consciously or unconsciously, from sex. We will imagine the members of Mr. Coote's Society being greatly moved by his description, and the sudden determination of everybody that dancing must be stopped. Had not Byron declared the waltz to be "half a whore"? Tolstoy has gone one better and asked people to say if a woman can remain chaste if a low dress is permitted and Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" is played. Forgetful, of course, that they have prosecuted "Don Juan," the Society accepts Byron's dictum as their war cry, and henceforth the business of Mr. Coote is to inquire into what is immoral in dress, in music, in wine, and in food. After a long consultation with experts and expensive law proceedings the Vigilance Association has (in our imagination) succeeded in reforming society as completely as it succeeded in reforming literature; and the months go by, October, November, December, January, February, March ... but one night the wind changes, and coming out of our houses in the morning we are taken with a sense of delight, a soft south wind is blowing and the lilacs are coming into bloom. My correspondent says that my book rouses sensuality. Perhaps it does, but not nearly so much as a spring day, and no one has yet thought of suppressing or curtailing spring days. Yet how infinitely more pernicious is their influence than any book! What thoughts they put into the hearts of lads and lasses! and perforce even the moralist has to accept the irrepressible feeling of union and growth, the loosening of the earth about the hyacinth shoots and the birds going about their amorous business, and the white clouds floating up gladly through the blue air. Why, then, should he look askance at my book, which is no more than memories of my spring days? If the thing itself cannot be suppressed, why is it worth while to interfere with the recollection? What strange twist in his mind leads him to decry in art what he accepts in nature? A strange twist indeed, one which may be described as a sort of inverted sexuality, finding its pleasure not in the spring day, but in odd corners of ancient literature read only for the sake of passages which he declares to be disgusting, and in spying on modern literature, seeking out passages and expressions which might be denounced in the newspapers or proceeded against in the police court. The psychology of one of these purity mongers is more interesting to the alienist than to a man of letters. Let us take a typical case, that of the late Lord ----. Forty or fifty years ago he was one of the most strenuous advocates of purity in literature, and more shops were raided at his instigation than at any other; yet when he died his library was found to contain the finest collection of impure literature in Europe, and his executors were left wondering whether the prosecutions were prompted by a desire to increase the value of his collection by the destruction of rare books, copies of which were in his possession, or whether he had been moved by conscientious scruples; a man might bamboozle himself in this way: "I am a man of letters and possess these books because they are rare, a curious corner of literature, but it would be highly inexpedient for others to possess them." His conscience might take a still more curious turn, leading to a dizzier height: "I am a sinner; that, alas! is so; but I can prevent others from sinning likewise." No doubt the greater part of the literature which the noble lord collected with so much industry was of that frankly indecent kind which is debarred from every library, Continental as well as English and American. There is a literature which does not come within the scope of the present inquiry, and there is what may perhaps be called a border literature, books which are found in public libraries in the German, the French, and the Italian texts. It seems pertinent to ask why a little knowledge of French and German and Italian should procure the right to read Brantôme's "Femmes Gallantes." It would be difficult for anybody to say that this book is not frankly obscene, and yet in the French text I suppose every library contains it. Casanova's "Memoirs" is another book of the same kind; I am not aware of any complete translation of Boccaccio's tales, but every library possesses an edition in the original Italian. The only reason that can be put forward for the suppression of a book is that it is harmful, and if Brantôme, Casanova, and Boccaccio are harmful in English, they do harm to those who can read them in the original texts. But perhaps I have pointed out enough inconsistencies, and the reader, growing weary, may say: "Are you so young, then, that you don't know that the world is a mass of contradictions? that life is no more than a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing?" Shakespeare did no more than to put into eloquent language every man's belief, that we are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas, and can anything be less consequent than--we need look no further back than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the English people as one of the most immoral of writers; for twenty years at least this opinion obtained in the press, and even among men of letters; suddenly the opinion disappeared, it went out like the flame of a candle; the text is the same, not a comma has been changed, yet now everybody reads it differently. But I must not allow myself to be drawn into speaking of the moral crusades directed against other writers; the task is tempting, and I hope it will be undertaken one of these days. Here, at all events, my concern is with my own writings, as indicated by the title of the article, and it is doubtful if reference to any book would make my point clearer than the tale of what happened in America to my own book, "Esther Waters." The proof sheets were sent in turn to three leading firms, Scribner, Harper, and Appleton, and all three refused the book on the ground that, while recognizing, etc., they did not think it was exactly the kind of book, etc. Even experts make mistakes; this is not denied; what makes my story so remarkable is that all three firms offered to publish an authorized edition of the book as soon as news of its success in England had been cabled to New York. Mr. Appleton, whom I met in Paris, expressed his regret that expert opinion regarding this book had been at fault. "The book," he said, "was quite a proper book to publish, a most admirable book, which would do honor to any firm." I answered: "Very likely all you say, Mr. Appleton, is true, but three weeks ago the experts thought differently. How is it that an immoral book can become moral in three weeks?" My next book, "Evelyn Innes," disturbed the house of Appleton as much as "Esther Waters," and a gentleman of leisure connected with the firm was deputed to mark out not the passages to which he himself took exception, but to which, being an expert, he felt sure that others would take exception. The gentleman was kind enough to insist on submitting his marked copy to me, and my wonderment increased as I turned over the pages, and it reached a climax when I happened upon the following passage, which had been marked to be omitted by the American printer. The passage was: "... in her stage life Evelyn was an agent of the sensual passion, not only with her voice, but in her arms, her neck, and hair, and in every expression of her face; and it was the craving music that had thrown her into Ulick's arms. If it had subjugated her how much more would it subjugate and hold within its persuasion the listener--the listener, who perceived in the music nothing but its sensuality?" "But for what reason," I asked the expert, "do you suggest the elimination of this passage? This is the Puritan point of view. I thought that your proposal was to draw my attention to the passages to which you thought the Puritan would object." "Ah," he said, "that is how I began, but as I got on with the work I thought it better to mark every passage that might give offense." "And to whom would this passage give offense?" I said. "Certainly not to any religious body?" "No," he answered, "not to any religious body, but it would give offense to the subscribers to the New Opera House. If parents read that the music of 'Tristan' threw Evelyn Innes into the arms of Ulick Dean, they would not care to bring their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our casual experience instead of in our hearts. One would have thought that my pointing out the absurdity of this expurgation of "Evelyn Innes" to the house of Appleton would have saved it ever afterwards from similar folly, and forgetful that experience is, as Coleridge describes it, only a lamp in a vessel's stern which throws a light on the waters we have passed through, none on those which lie before us, the publication of "The Lake" was issued by Messrs. Appleton with my consent. The book, as the American public already know, is free from all matter to which the most severe moralist could take exception, yet the American edition did not conform entirely with the English; a dedication written in French was omitted, for what reason I do not know, but it was omitted. The matter may seem a small one, and it may seem invidious to allude to it at all, but on an occasion like the present nothing must be passed over. The English proofs of the "Memoirs" were read, and the book was accepted, but when it was set up in America it did not seem quite so moral in the American type as it did in the English and difficulties arose; these have been alluded to in the first paragraph of this article, and perhaps wrongly I agreed that the two stories, "The Lovers of Orelay" and "In the Luxembourg Gardens," should be left out. On September 28th I wrote, suggesting that "In the Luxembourg Gardens" might be retained, that it was only necessary to drop out a few sentences to make it, as the expert would say, "acceptable to the American public," but it never occurred to me that "The Lovers of Orelay" could be published in any form except the form in which I wrote it. This morning I received a letter from Mr. Sears. October 8, 1906. DEAR MR. MOORE: Your letter of September 28th has just arrived this morning. I hope that by the time you receive this I shall have the open letter which we are to print in "Memoirs of My Dead Life." The book is all ready, waiting for it. As a matter of fact, we have not cut out either "In the Luxembourg Gardens" or "The Lovers of Orelay." We simply have taken out parts of each. Very truly yours, J. H. SEARS. "Simply have taken out parts of each!" My book, then, is a sort of unfortunate animal, whose destiny was to be thrown on the American vivisecting table and pieces taken out of it. Well, I raise no objection. The promise that this preface will be published without alteration soothes me (it is the anaesthetic), and after all, is it not an honor to be Bowdlerized? Only the best are deemed dangerous.... I am not aware that anybody ever took liberties with Miss Braddon's texts. And the day of the Bowdlerizer is a brief one! Sooner or later the original text is published. This is the rule, and I am confident I shall not prove an exception to the rule. GEORGE MOORE. MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE CHAPTER I SPRING IN LONDON As I sit at my window on Sunday morning, lazily watching the sparrows--restless black dots that haunt the old tree at the corner of King's Bench Walk--I begin to distinguish a faint green haze in the branches of the old lime. Yes, there it is green in the branches; and I'm moved by an impulse--the impulse of Spring is in my feet; india-rubber seems to have come into the soles of my feet, and I would see London. It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom, one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street, celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood. The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint blue and delicate air. Spires are so beautiful that we would fain believe that they will outlast creeds; religion or no religion we must have spires, and in town and country--spires showing between trees and rising out of the city purlieus. The spring tide is rising; the almond trees are in bloom, that one growing in an area spreads its Japanese decoration fan-like upon the wall. The hedges in the time-worn streets of Fitzroy Square light up--how the green runs along? The spring is more winsome here than in the country. One must be in London to see the spring. One can see the spring from afar dancing in St. John's wood, haze and sun playing together like a lad and a lass. The sweet air, how tempting! How exciting! It melts on the lips in fond kisses, instilling a delicate gluttony of life. It would be pleasant in these gardens walking through shadowy alleys, lit here and there by a ray, to see girls walking hand in hand, catching at branches, as girls do when dreaming of lovers. But alas! the gardens are empty; only some daffodils! But how beautiful is the curve of the flower when seen in profile, and still more beautiful is the starry yellow when the flower is seen full face. That antique flower carries my mind back--not to Greek times, for the daffodil has lost something of its ancient loveliness; it is more reminiscent of a Wedgwood than of a Greek vase. My nonsense thoughts amuse me; I follow my thoughts as a child follows butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of health--my health and the health of the world. This April day has set brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming; an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of--well, I do not know of what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but a canal does nothing. Here comes a boat! The canal has not been abandoned. Ah! that boat has interrupted my dreams, and I feel quite wretched. I had hoped that the last had passed twenty years ago. Here it comes with its lean horse, the rope tightening and stretching, a great black mass with ripples at the prow and a figure bearing against the rudder. A canal reminds me of my childhood; every child likes a canal. A canal recalls the first wonder. We all remember the wonder with which we watched the first barge, the wonder which the smoke coming out of the funnel excited. When my father asked me why I'd like to go to Dublin better by canal than by railroad, I couldn't tell him. Nor could I tell any one to-day why I love a canal. One never loses one's fondness for canals. The boats glide like the days, and the toiling horse is a symbol! how he strains, sticking his toes into the path! There are visits to pay. Three hours pass--of course women, always women. But at six I am free, and I resume my meditations in declining light as the cab rolls through the old brick streets that crowd round Golden Square; streets whose names you meet in old novels; streets full of studios where Hayden, Fuseli, and others of the rank historical tribe talked art with a big A, drank their despair away, and died wondering why the world did not recognise their genius. Children are scrambling round a neglected archway, striving to reach to a lantern of old time. The smell of these dry faded streets is peculiar to London; there is something of the odour of the original marsh in the smell of these streets; it rises through the pavement and mingles with the smoke. Fancy follows fancy, image succeeds image; till all is but a seeming, and mystery envelops everything. That white Arch seems to speak to me out of the twilight. I would fain believe it has its secret to reveal. London wraps herself in mists; blue scarfs are falling--trailing. London has a secret! Let me peer into her veiled face and read. I have only to fix my thoughts to decipher--what? I know not. Something ... perhaps. But I cannot control my thoughts. I am absorbed in turn by the beauty of the Marble Arch and the perspective of the Bayswater Road, fading like an apparition amid the romance of great trees. As I turn away, for the wind thrills and obliges me to walk rapidly, I think how fortunate I am to experience these emotions in Hyde Park, whereas my fellows have to go to Switzerland and to climb up Mont Blanc, to feel half what I am feeling now, as I stand looking across the level park watching the sunset, a dusky one. The last red bar of light fades, and nothing remains but the grey park with the blue of the suburb behind it, flowing away full of mist and people, dim and mournful to the pallid lights of Kensington; and its crowds are like strips of black tape scattered here and there. By the railings the tape has been wound into a black ball, and, no doubt, the peg on which it is wound is some preacher promising human nature deliverance from evil if it will forego the spring time. But the spring time continues, despite the preacher, over yonder, under branches swelling with leaf and noisy with sparrows; the spring is there amid the boys and girls, boys dressed in ill-fitting suits of broadcloth, daffodils in their buttonholes; girls hardly less coarse, creatures made for work, escaped for a while from the thraldom of the kitchen, now doing the business of the world better than the preacher; poor servants of sacred Spring. A woman in a close-fitting green cloth dress passes me to meet a young man; a rich fur hangs from her shoulders; and they go towards Park Lane, towards the wilful little houses with low balconies and pendent flower-baskets swinging in the areas. Circumspect little gardens! There is one, Greek as an eighteenth-century engraving, and the woman in the close-fitting green cloth dress, rich fur hanging from her shoulders, almost hiding the pleasant waist, enters one of these. She is Park Lane. Park Lane supper parties and divorce are written in her eyes and manner. The old beau, walking swiftly lest he should catch cold, his moustache clearly dyed, his waist certainly pinched by a belt, he, too, is Park Lane. And those two young men, talking joyously--admirable specimens of Anglo-Saxons, slender feet, varnished boots, health and abundant youth--they, too, are characteristic of Park Lane. Park Lane dips in a narrow and old-fashioned way as it enters Piccadilly. Piccadilly has not yet grown vulgar, only a little modern, a little out of keeping with the beauty of the Green Park, of that beautiful dell, about whose mounds I should like to see a comedy of the Restoration acted. I used to stand here, at this very spot, twenty years ago, to watch the moonlight between the trees, and the shadows of the trees floating over that beautiful dell; I used to think of Wycherly's comedy, "Love in St. James's Park," and I think of it still. In those days the Argyle Rooms, Kate Hamilton's in Panton Street, and the Café de la Régence were the fashion. But Paris drew me from these, towards other pleasures, towards the Nouvelle Athènes and the Elysée Montmartre; and when I returned to London after an absence of ten years I found a new London, a less English London. Paris draws me still, and I shall be there in three weeks, when the chestnuts are in bloom. CHAPTER II FLOWERING NORMANDY On my arrival in Paris, though the hour was that stupid hour of seven in the morning, while I walked up the grey platform, my head was filled with memories of the sea, for all the way across it had seemed like a beautiful blue plain without beginning or end, a plain on which the ship threw a little circle of light, moving always like life itself, with darkness before and after. I remembered how we steamed into the long winding harbour in the dusk, half an hour before we were due--at daybreak. Against the green sky, along the cliff's edge, a line of broken paling zigzagged; one star shone in the dawning sky, one reflection wavered in the tranquil harbour. There was no sound except the splashing of paddle-wheels, and not wind enough to take the fishing boats out to sea; the boats rolled in the tide, their sails only half-filled. From the deck of the steamer we watched the strange crews, wild-looking men and boys, leaning over the bulwarks; and I remembered how I had sought for the town amid the shadow, but nowhere could I discover trace of it; yet I knew it was there, smothered in the dusk, under the green sky, its streets leading to the cathedral, the end of every one crossed by flying buttresses, and the round roof disappearing amid the chimney-stacks. A curious, pathetic town, full of nuns and pigeons and old gables and strange dormer windows, and courtyards where French nobles once assembled--fish will be sold there in a few hours. Once I spent a summer in Dieppe. And during the hour we had to wait for the train, during the hour that we watched the green sky widening between masses of shrouding cloud, I thought of ten years ago. The town emerged very slowly, and only a few roofs were visible when the fisher girl clanked down the quays with a clumsy movement of the hips, and we were called upon to take our seats in the train. We moved along the quays, into the suburbs, and then into a quiet garden country of little fields and brooks and hillsides breaking into cliffs. The fields and the hills were still shadowless and grey, and even the orchards in bloom seemed sad. But what shall I say of their beauty when the first faint lights appeared, when the first rose clouds appeared above the hills? Orchard succeeded orchard, and the farmhouses were all asleep. There is no such journey in the world as the journey from Dieppe to Paris on a fine May morning. Never shall I forget the first glimpse of Rouen Cathedral in the diamond air, the branching river, and the tall ships anchored in the deep current. I was dreaming of the cathedral when we had left Rouen far behind us, and when I awoke from my dream we were in the midst of a flat green country, the river winding about islands and through fields in which stood solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels--that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; and sometimes we saw it ahead of us, looping up the verdant landscape as if it were a gown, running through it like a white silk ribbon, and over there the green gown disappearing in fine muslin vapours, drawn about the low horizon. I did not weary of this landscape, and was sorry when the first villa appeared. Another and then another showed between the chestnut-trees in bloom; and there were often blue vases on the steps and sometimes lanterns in metalwork hung from wooden balconies. The shutters were not yet open, those heavy French shutters that we all know so well, and that give the French houses such a look of comfort, of ease, of long tradition. Suddenly the aspect of a street struck me as a place I had known, and I said, "Is it possible that we are passing through Asnières?" The name flitted past, and I was glad I had recognised Asnières, for at the end of that very long road is the restaurant where we used to dine, and between it and the bridge is the _bal_ where we used to dance. It was there I saw the beautiful Blanche D'Antigny surrounded by her admirers. It was there she used to sit by the side of the composer of the musical follies which she sang--in those days I thought she sang enchantingly. Those were the days of L'Oeil, Crevé, and Chilpéric. She once passed under the chestnut-trees of that dusty little _bal de banlieue_ with me by her side, proud of being with her. She has gone and Julia Baron has gone; Hortense has outlived them all. She must be very old, eighty-five at least. It would be wonderful to hear her sing "Mon cher amant, je te jure" in the quavering voice of eighty-five; it would be wonderful to hear her sing it because she doesn't know how wonderful she is; the old light of love requires an interpreter, and she has had many; many great poets have voiced her woe and decadence. Not five minutes from that _bal_ was the little house in which Hervé lived, and to which he used to invite us to supper; and where, after supper, he used to play to us the last music he had composed. We listened, but the public would listen to it no longer. Sedan had taken all the tinkle out of it, and the poor _compositeur toqué_ never caught the public ear again. We listened to his chirpy scores, believing that they would revive that old nervous fever which was the Empire when Hortense used to dance, when Hortense took the Empire for a spring-board, when Paris cried out, "Cascade ma fille, Hortense, cascade." The great Hortense Schneider, the great goddess of folly, used to come down there to sing the songs which were intended to revive her triumphs. She was growing old then, her days were over, and Hervé's day was over. Vainly did he pile parody upon parody; vainly did he seize the conductor's _bâton_; the days of their glory had gone. Now Asnières itself is forgotten; the modern youth has chosen another suburb to disport himself in; the ballroom has been pulled down, and never again will an orchestra play a note of these poor scores; even their names are unknown. A few bars of a chorus of pages came back to me, remembered only by me, all are gone, like Hortense and Blanche and Julia. But after all I am in Paris. Almost the same Paris; almost the same George Moore, my senses awake as before to all enjoyment, my soul as enwrapped as ever in the divine sensation of life. Once my youth moved through thy whiteness, O City, and its dreams lay down to dreams in the freedom of thy fields! Years come and years go, but every year I see city and plain in the happy exaltation of Spring, and departing before the cuckoo, while the blossom is still bright on the bough, it has come to me to think that Paris and May are one. CHAPTER III A WAITRESS Feeling that he would never see Scotland again, Stevenson wrote in a preface to "Catriona":--"I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny." Does not this sentence read as if it were written in stress of some effusive febrile emotion, as if he wrote while still pursuing his idea? And so it reminds us of a moth fluttering after a light. But however vacillating, the sentence contains some pretty clauses, and it will be remembered though not perhaps in its original form. We shall forget the "laughter and the tears" and the "sudden freshet," and a simpler phrase will form itself in our memories. The emotion that Stevenson had to express transpires only in the words, "romance of destiny, ultimate islands." Who does not feel his destiny to be a romance, and who does not admire the ultimate island whither his destiny will cast him? Giacomo Cenci, whom the Pope ordered to be flayed alive, no doubt admired the romance of destiny that laid him on his ultimate island, a raised plank, so that the executioner might conveniently roll up the skin of his belly like an apron. And a hare that I once saw beating a tambourine in Regent Street looked at me so wistfully that I am sure it admired in some remote way the romance of destiny that had taken it from the woodland and cast it upon its ultimate island--in this case a barrow. But neither of these strange examples of the romance of destiny seems to me more wonderful than the destiny of a wistful Irish girl whom I saw serving drinks to students in a certain ultimate café in the Latin Quarter; she, too, no doubt, admired the destiny which had cast her out, ordaining that she should die amid tobacco smoke, serving drinks to students, entertaining them with whatever conversation they desired. Gervex, Mademoiselle D'Avary, and I had gone to this café after the theatre for half an hour's distraction; I had thought that the place seemed too rough for Mademoiselle D'Avary, but Gervex had said that we should find a quiet corner, and we had happened to choose one in charge of a thin, delicate girl, a girl touched with languor, weakness, and a grace which interested and moved me; her cheeks were thin, and the deep grey eyes were wistful as a drawing of Rossetti; her waving brown hair fell over the temples, and was looped up low over the neck after the Rossetti fashion. I had noticed how the two women looked at each other, one woman healthful and rich, the other poor and ailing; I had guessed the thought that passed across their minds. Each had doubtless asked and wondered why life had come to them so differently. But first I must tell who was Mademoiselle D'Avary, and how I came to know her. I had gone to Tortoni, a once-celebrated cafe at the corner of the Rue Taitbout, the dining place of Rossini. When Rossini had earned an income of two thousand pounds a year it is recorded that he said: "Now I've done with music, it has served its turn, and I'm going to dine every day at Tortoni's." Even in my time Tortoni was the rendezvous of the world of art and letters; every one was there at five o'clock, and to Tortoni I went the day I arrived in Paris. To be seen there would make known the fact that I was in Paris. Tortoni was a sort of publication. At Tortoni I had discovered a young man, one of my oldest friends, a painter of talent--he had a picture in the Luxembourg--and a man who was beloved by women. Gervex, for it was he, had seized me by the hand, and with voluble eagerness had told me that I was the person he was seeking: he had heard of my coming and had sought me in every cafe from the Madeleine to Tortoni. He had been seeking me because he wished to ask me to dinner to meet Mademoiselle D'Avary; we were to fetch her in the Rue des Capucines. I write the name of the street, not because it matters to my little story in what street she lived, but because the name is an evocation. Those who like Paris like to hear the names of the streets, and the long staircase turning closely up the painted walls, the brown painted doors on the landings, and the bell rope, are evocative of Parisian life; and Mademoiselle D'Avary is herself an evocation, for she was an actress of the Palais Royal. My friend, too, is an evocation, he was one of those whose pride is not to spend money upon women, whose theory of life is that "If she likes to come round to the studio when one's work is done, _nous pouvons faire la fête ensemble_." But however defensible this view of life may be, and there is much to be said for it, I had thought that he might have refrained from saying when I looked round the drawing-room admiring it--a drawing-room furnished with sixteenth-century bronzes, Dresden figures, _étagères_ covered with silver ornaments, three drawings by Boucher--Boucher in three periods, a French Boucher, a Flemish Boucher, and an Italian Boucher--that I must not think that any of these things were presents from him, and from saying when she came into the room that the bracelet on her arm was not from him. It had seemed to me in slightly bad taste that he should remind her that he made no presents, for his remark had clouded her joyousness; I could see that she was not so happy at the thought of going out to dine with him as she had been. It was _chez Foyoz_ that we dined, an old-fashioned restaurant still free from the new taste that likes walls painted white and gold, electric lamps and fiddlers. After dinner we had gone to see a play next door at the Odéon, a play in which shepherds spoke to each other about singing brooks, and stabbed each other for false women, a play diversified with vintages, processions, wains, and songs. Nevertheless it had not interested us. And during the _entr'actes_ Gervex had paid visits in various parts of the house, leaving Mademoiselle D'Avary to make herself agreeable to me. I dearly love to walk by the perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers. After the play he had said, "Allons boire un bock," and we had turned into a students' café, a café furnished with tapestries and oak tables, and old-time jugs and Medicis gowns, a café in which a student occasionally caught up a tall bock in his teeth, emptied it at a gulp, and after turning head over heels, walked out without having smiled. Mademoiselle D'Avary's beauty and fashion had drawn the wild eyes of all the students gathered there. She wore a flower-enwoven dress, and from under the large hat her hair showed dark as night; and her southern skin filled with rich tints, yellow and dark green where the hair grew scanty on the neck; the shoulders drooped into opulent suggestion in the lace bodice. And it was interesting to compare her ripe beauty with the pale deciduous beauty of the waitress. Mademoiselle D'Avary sat, her fan wide-spread across her bosom, her lips parted, the small teeth showing between the red lips. The waitress sat, her thin arms leaning on the table, joining very prettily in the conversation, betraying only in one glance that she knew that she was only a failure and Mademoiselle D'Avary a success. It was some time before the ear caught the slight accent; an accent that was difficult to trace to any country. Once I heard a southern intonation, and then a northern; finally I heard an unmistakable English intonation, and said: "But you're English." "I'm Irish. I'm from Dublin." And thinking of a girl reared in its Dublin conventions, but whom the romance of destiny had cast upon this ultimate café, I asked her how she had found her way here; and she told me she had left Dublin when she was sixteen; she had come to Paris six years ago to take a situation as nursery governess. She used to go with the children into the Luxembourg Gardens and talk to them in English. One day a student had sat on the bench beside her. The rest of the story is easily guessed. But he had no money to keep her, and she had to come to this café to earn her living. "It doesn't suit me, but what am I to do? One must live, and the tobacco smoke makes me cough." I sat looking at her, and she must have guessed what was passing in my mind, for she told me that one lung was gone; and we spoke of health, of the South, and she said that the doctor had advised her to go away south. Seeing that Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary were engaged in conversation, I leaned forward and devoted all my attention to this wistful Irish girl, so interesting in her phthisis, in her red Medicis gown, her thin arms showing in the long rucked sleeves. I had to offer her drink; to do so was the custom of the place. She said that drink harmed her, but she would get into trouble if she refused drink; perhaps I would not mind paying for a piece of beef-steak instead. She had been ordered raw steak! I have only to close my eyes to see her going over to the corner of the cafe and cutting a piece and putting it away. She said she would eat it before going to bed, and that would be two hours hence, about three. While talking to her I thought of a cottage in the South amid olive and orange trees, an open window full of fragrant air, and this girl sitting by it. "I should like to take you south and attend upon you." "I'm afraid you would grow weary of nursing me. And I should be able to give you very little in return for your care. The doctor says I'm not to love any one." We must have talked for some time, for it was like waking out of a dream when Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary got up to go, and, seeing how interested I was, he laughed, saying to Mademoiselle D'Avary that it would be kind to leave me with my new friend. His pleasantry jarred, and though I should like to have remained, I followed them into the street, where the moon was shining over the Luxembourg Gardens. And as I have said before, I dearly love to walk by a perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers: but it is sad to find oneself alone on the pavement at midnight. Instead of going back to the café I wandered on, thinking of the girl I had seen, and of her certain death, for she could not live many months in that café. We all want to think at midnight, under the moon, when the city looks like a black Italian engraving, and poems come to us as we watch a swirling river. Not only the idea of a poem came to me that night, but on the Pont Neuf the words began to sing together, and I jotted down the first lines before going to bed. Next morning I continued my poem, and all day was passed in this little composition. We are alone! Listen, a little while, And hear the reason why your weary smile And lute-toned speaking are so very sweet, And how my love of you is more complete Than any love of any lover. They Have only been attracted by the grey Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim And delicate form, or some such other whim, The simple pretexts of all lovers;--I For other reason. Listen whilst I try To say. I joy to see the sunset slope Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope, Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm, In mildly modulated phrases; thus Your life shall fade like a voluptuous Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die Like some soft evening's sad serenity.... I would possess your dying hours; indeed My love is worthy of the gift, I plead For them. Although I never loved as yet, Methinks that I might love you; I would get From out the knowledge that the time was brief, That tenderness, whose pity grows to grief, And grief that sanctifies, a joy, a charm Beyond all other loves, for now the arm Of Death is stretched to you-ward, and he claims You as his bride. Maybe my soul misnames Its passion; love perhaps it is not, yet To see you fading like a violet, Or some sweet thought, would be a very strange And costly pleasure, far beyond the range Of formal man's emotion. Listen, I Will chose a country spot where fields of rye And wheat extend in rustling yellow plains, Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes, To pass our honeymoon; a cottage where The porch and windows are festooned with fair Green leaves of eglantine, and look upon A shady garden where we'll walk alone In the autumn summer evenings; each will see Our walks grow shorter, till to the orange tree, The garden's length, is far, and you will rest From time to time, leaning upon my breast Your languid lily face, then later still Unto the sofa by the window-sill Your wasted body I shall carry, so That you may drink the last left lingering glow Of evening, when the air is filled with scent Of blossoms; and my spirits shall be rent The while with many griefs. Like some blue day That grows more lovely as it fades away, Gaining that calm serenity and height Of colour wanted, as the solemn night Steals forward you will sweetly fall asleep For ever and for ever; I shall weep A day and night large tears upon your face, Laying you then beneath a rose-red place Where I may muse and dedicate and dream Volumes of poesy of you; and deem It happiness to know that you are far From any base desires as that fair star Set in the evening magnitude of heaven. Death takes but little, yea, your death has given Me that deep peace and immaculate possession Which man may never find in earthly passion. Good poetry of course not, but good verse, well turned every line except the penultimate. The elision is not a happy one, and the mere suppression of the "and" does not produce a satisfying line. Death takes but little, Death I thank for giving Me a remembrance, and a pure possession Of unrequited love. And mumbling the last lines of the poem, I hastened to the café near the Luxembourg Gardens, wondering if I should find courage to ask the girl to come away to the South and live, fearing that I should not, fearing it was the idea rather than the deed that tempted me; for the soul of a poet is not the soul of Florence Nightingale. I was sorry for this wistful Irish girl, and was hastening to her, I knew not why; not to show her the poem--the very thought was intolerable. Often did I stop on the way to ask myself why I was going, and on what errand. Without discovering an answer in my heart I hastened on, feeling, I suppose, in some blind way that my quest was in my own heart. I would know if it were capable of making a sacrifice; and sitting down at one of her tables I waited, but she did not come, and I asked the student by me if he knew the girl generally in charge of these tables. He said he did, and told me about her case. There was no hope for her; only a transfusion of blood could save her; she was almost bloodless. He described how blood could be taken from the arm of a healthy man and passed into the veins of the almost bloodless. But as he spoke things began to get dim and his voice to grow faint; I heard some one saying, "You're very pale," and he ordered some brandy for me. The South could not save her; practically nothing could; and I returned home thinking of her. Twenty years have passed, and I am thinking of her again. Poor little Irish girl! Cast out in the end by a sudden freshet on an ultimate café. Poor little heap of bones! And I bow my head and admire the romance of destiny which ordained that I, who only saw her once, should be the last to remember her. Perhaps I should have forgotten her had it not been that I wrote a poem, a poem which I now inscribe and dedicate to her nameless memory. CHAPTER IV THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN Octave Barrès liked his friends to come to his studio, and a few of us who believed in his talent used to drop in during the afternoon, and little by little I got to know every picture, every sketch; but one never knows everything that a painter has done, and one day, coming into the studio, I caught sight of a full-length portrait I had never seen before on the easel. "It was in the back room turned to the wall," he said. "I took it out, thinking that the Russian prince who ordered the Pegasus decoration might buy it," and he turned away, not liking to hear my praise of it; for it neither pleases a painter to hear his early works praised nor abused. "I painted it before I knew how to paint," and standing before me, his palette in his hand, he expounded his new aestheticism: that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century all painting had been done first in monochrome and then glazed, and what we know as solid painting had been invented by Greuze. One day in the Louvre he had perceived something in Delacroix, something not wholly satisfactory; this something had set him thinking. It was Rubens, however, who had revealed the secret! It was Rubens who had taught him how to paint! He admitted that there was danger in retracing one's steps, in beginning one's education over again; but what help was there for it, since painting was not taught in the schools. I had heard all he had to say before, and could not change my belief that every man must live in the ideas of his time, be they good or bad. It is easy to say that we must only adopt Rubens's method and jealously guard against any infringement on our personality; but in art our personality is determined by the methods we employ, and Octave's portrait interested me more than the Pegasus decoration, or the three pink Venuses holding a basket of flowers above their heads. The portrait was crude and violent, but so was the man that had painted it; he had painted it when he was a disciple of Manet's, and the methods of Manet were in agreement with my friend's temperament. We are all impressionists to-day; we are eager to note down what we feel and see; and the carefully prepared rhetorical manner of Rubens was as incompatible with Octave's temperament as the manner of John Milton is with mine. There was a thought of Goya in the background, in the contrast between the grey and the black, and there was something of Manet's simplifications in the face, but these echoes were faint, nor did they matter, for they were of our time. In looking at his model he had seen and felt something; he had noted this harshly, crudely, but he noted it; and to do this, is after all the main thing. His sitter had inspired him. The word "inspired" offended him; I withdrew it; I said that he had been fortunate in his model, and he admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine delicate features and blue-black hair lying close about her head like feathers--she wore her hair as a blackbird wears his wing--compelled one to paint; and after admiring the face I admired the black silk dress he had painted her in, a black silk dress covered with black lace. She wore grey pearls in her ears, and pearls upon her neck. I was interested in the quality of the painting, so different from Octave's present painting, but I was more interested in the woman herself. The picture revealed to me something in human nature that I had never seen before, something that I had never thought of. The soul in this picture was so intense that I forgot the painting, and began to think of her. She was unlike any one I had ever met in Octave Barrès's studio; a studio beloved of women; the women one met there seemed to be of all sorts, but in truth they were all of a sort. They began to arrive about four o'clock in the afternoon, and they stayed on until they were sent away. He allowed them to play the piano and sing to him; he allowed them, as he would phrase it, to _grouiller_ about the place, and they talked of the painters they had sat to, of their gowns, and they showed us their shoes and their garters. He heeded them hardly at all, walking to and fro thinking of his painting, of his archaic painting. I often wondered if his appearance counted for anything in his renunciation of modern methods, and certainly his appearance was a link of association; he did not look like a modern man, but like a sixteenth-century baron; his beard and his broken nose and his hierarchial air contributed to the resemblance; the jersey he wore reminded one of a cuirass, a coat of mail. Even in his choice of a dwelling-place he seemed instinctively to avoid the modern; he had found a studio in the street, the name of which no one had ever heard before; it was found with difficulty; and the studio, too, it was hidden behind great crumbling walls, in the middle of a plot of ground in which some one was growing cabbages. Octave was always, as he would phrase it, _dans une dèche épouvantable_, but he managed to keep a thoroughbred horse in the stable at the end of the garden, and this horse was ordered as soon as the light failed. He would say, "Mes amis et mes amies, je regrette, mais mon cheval m'attend." And the women liked to see him mount, and many thought, I am sure, that he looked like a Centaur as he rode away. But who was this refined girl? this--a painting tells things that cannot be translated into words--this olive-skinned girl who might have sat to Raphael for a Virgin, so different from Octave's usual women? They were of the Montmartre kin; but this woman might be a Spanish princess. And remembering that Octave had said he had taken out the portrait hoping that the Russian who had ordered the Pegasus might buy it, the thought struck me that she might be the prince's mistress. His mistress! Oh, what fabulous fortune! What might her history be? I burned to hear it, and wearied of Octave's seemingly endless chatter about his method of painting; I had heard all he was saying many times before, but I listened to it all again, and to propitiate him I regretted that the picture was not painted in his present manner, "for there are good things in the picture," I said, "and the model--you seem to have been lucky with your model." "Yes, she was nice to paint from, but it was difficult to get her to sit. A _concierge's_ daughter--you wouldn't think it, would you?" My astonishment amused him, and he began to laugh. "You don't know her?" he said. "That is Marie Pellegrin," and when I asked him where he had met her he told me, at Alphonsine's; but I did not know where Alphonsine's was. "I'm going to dine there to-night. I'm going to meet her; she's going back to Russia with the prince; she has been staying in the Quartier Bréda on her holiday. _Sacré nom!_ Half-past five, and I haven't washed my brushes yet!" In answer to my question, what he meant by going to the Quartier Bréda for a holiday, he said: "I'll tell you all about that in the carriage." But no sooner had we got into the carriage than he remembered that he must leave word for a woman who had promised to sit to him, and swearing that a message would not delay us for more than a few minutes he directed the coachman. We were shown into a drawing-room, and the lady ran out of her bedroom, wrapping herself as she ran in a _peignoir_, and the sitting was discussed in the middle of a polished _parquet_ floor. We at last returned to the carriage, but we were hardly seated when he remembered another appointment. He scribbled notes in the lodges of the _concierges_, and between whiles told me all he knew of the story of Marie Pellegrin. This delicate woman that I had felt could not be of the Montmartre kin was the daughter of a _concierge_ on the Boulevard Extérieur. She had run away from home at fifteen, had danced at the Elysée Montmartre. Sa jupe avait des trous, Elle aimait des voyous, Ils ont des yeux si doux. But one day a Russian prince had caught sight of her, and had built her a palace in the Champs Elysées; but the Russian prince and his palace bored her. The stopping of the carriage interrupted Octave's narrative. "Here we are," he said, seizing a bell hanging on a jangling wire, and the green door in the crumbling wall opened, and I saw an undersized woman--I saw Alphonsine! And her portrait, a life-sized caricature drawn by Octave, faced me from the white-washed wall of the hen-coop. He had drawn her two cats purring about her legs, and had written under it, "Ils viennent après le mou." Her garden was a gravelled space; I think there was one tree in it. A tent had been stretched from wall to wall; and a seedy-looking waiter laid the tables (there were two), placing bottles of wine in front of each knife and fork, and bread in long sticks at regular intervals. He was constantly disturbed by the ringing of the bell, and had to run to the door to admit the company. Here and there I recognised faces that I had already seen in the studio; Clementine, who last year was studying the part of Elsa and this year was singing, "La femme de feu, la cui, la cui, la cuisinière," in a _café chantant_; and Margaret Byron, who had just retreated from Russia--a disastrous campaign hers was said to have been. The greater number were _hors concours_, for Alphonsine's was to the aged courtesan what Chelsea Hospital is to the aged soldier. It was a sort of human garden full of the sound and colour of October. I scrutinised the crowd. How could any one of these women interest the woman whose portrait I had seen in Barrès's studio? That one, for instance, whom I saw every morning in the Rue des Martyres, in a greasy _peignoir_, going marketing, a basket on her arm. Search as I would I could not find a friend for Marie among the women nor a lover among the men--neither of those two stout middle-aged men with large whiskers, who had probably once been stockbrokers, nor the withered journalist whom I heard speaking to Octave about a duel he had fought recently; nor the little sandy Scotchman whose French was not understood by the women and whose English was nearly unintelligible to me; nor the man who looked like a head-waiter--Alphonsine's lover; he had been a waiter, and he told you with the air of Napoleon describing Waterloo that he had "created" a certain fashionable café on the Boulevard. I could not attribute any one of these men to Marie; and Octave spoke of her with indifference; she had interested him to paint, and now he hoped she would get the Russian to buy her picture. "But she's not here," I said. "She'll be here presently," Octave answered, and he went on talking to Clementine, a fair pretty woman whom one saw every night at the _Rat Mort_. It was when the soup-plates were being taken away that I saw a young woman dressed in black coming across the garden. It was she, Marie Pellegrin. She wore a dress similar to the one she wore in her portrait, a black silk covered with lace, and her black hair was swathed about her shapely little head. She was her portrait and something more. Her smile was her own, a sad little smile that seemed to come out of a depth of her being, and her voice was a little musical voice, irresponsible as a bird's, and during dinner I noticed how she broke into speech abruptly as a bird breaks into song, and she stopped as abruptly. I never saw a woman so like herself, and sometimes her beauty brought a little mist into my eyes, and I lost sight of her or very nearly, and I went on eating mechanically. Dinner seemed to end suddenly, and before I knew that it was over we were getting up from table. As we went towards the house where coffee was being served, Marie asked me if I played cards, but I excused myself, saying that I would prefer to sit and look at her; and just then a thin woman with red hair, who had arrived at the same time as Marie and who had sat next her at dinner, was introduced to me, and I was told that she was Marie's intimate friend, and that the two lived together whenever Marie returned to Montmartre. She was known as _La Glue_, her real name was Victorine, she had sat for Manet's picture of Olympe, but that was years ago. The face was thinner, but I recognised the red hair and the brown eyes, small eyes set closely, reminding one of _des petits verres de cognac_. Her sketch-book was being passed round, and as it came into my hands I noticed that she did not wear stays and was dressed in old grey woollen. She lit cigarette after cigarette, and leaned over Marie with her arm about her shoulder, advising her what cards to play. The game was baccarat, and in a little while I saw that Marie was losing a great deal of money, and a little later I saw _La Glue_ trying to persuade her away from the card-table. "One more deal." That deal lost her the last louis she had placed on the table. "Some one will have to pay my cab," she said. We were going to the Elysée Montmartre, and Alphonsine lent her a couple of louis, _pour passer sa soirée_, and we all went away in carriages, the little horses straining up the steep streets; the plumes of the women's hats floating over the carriage hoods. Marie was in one of the front carriages, and was waiting for us on the high steps leading from the street to the _bal_. "It's my last night," she said, "the last night I shall see the Elysée for many a month." "You'll soon be back again?" "You see, I have been offered five hundred thousand francs to go to Russia for three years. Fancy three years without seeing the Elysée," and she looked round as an angel might look upon Paradise out of which she is about to be driven. "The trees are beautiful," she said, "they're like a fairy tale," and that is exactly what they were like, rising into the summer darkness, unnaturally green above the electric lights. In the middle of a circle of white globes the orchestra played upon an _estrade_, and everyone whirled his partner as if she were a top. "I always sit over there under the trees in the angle," she said; and she was about to invite me to come and sit with her when her attention was distracted from me; for the people had drawn together into groups, and I heard everybody whispering: "That's Marie Pellegrin." Seeing her coming, her waiter with much ostentation began to draw aside tables and chairs, and in a few minutes she was sitting under her tree, she and _La Glue_ together, their friends about them, Marie distributing absinthe, brandy, and cigarettes. A little procession suddenly formed under the trees and came towards her, and Marie was presented with a great basket of flowers, and all her company with bouquets; and a little cheer went up from different parts of the _bal_, "Vive Marie Pellegrin, la reine de l'Elysée." The music began again, the people rushed to see a quadrille where two women, with ease, were kicking off men's hats; and while watching them I heard that a special display of fireworks had been arranged in Marie's honour, the news having got about that this was her last night at the Elysée. A swishing sound was heard; the rocket rose to its height high up in the thick sky. Then it dipped over, the star fell a little way and burst: it melted into turquoise blue, and changed to ruby red, beautiful as the colour of flowers, roses or tulips. The falling fire changed again and again. And Marie stood on a chair and watched till the last sparks vanished. "Doesn't she look like my picture now?" said Octave. "You seemed to have divined her soul." He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "I'm not a psychologist; I am a painter. But I must get a word with her," and with a carelessness that was almost insolence, he pushed his way into the crowd and called her, saying he wanted to speak to her; and they walked round the _bal_ together. I could not understand his indifference to her charm, and asked myself if he had always been so indifferent. In a little while they returned. "I'll do my best," I heard her say; and she ran back to join her companions. "I suppose you've seen enough of the Elysée?" "Ah! qu'elle est jolie ce soir; et elle ferait joliment marcher le Russe." We walked on in silence. Octave did not notice that he had said anything to jar my feelings; he was thinking of his portrait, and presently he said that he was sorry she was going to Russia. "I should like to begin another portrait, now that I have learned to paint." "Do you think she'll go to Russia?" "Yes, she'll go there; but she'll come back one of these days, and I'll get her to sit again. It is extraordinary how little is known of the art of painting; the art is forgotten. The old masters did perfectly in two days what we spend weeks fumbling at. In two days Rubens finished his _grisaille_, and the glazing was done with certainty, with skill, with ease in half an hour! He could get more depth of colour with a glaze than any one can to-day, however much paint is put on the canvas. The old masters had method; now there's none. One brush as well as another, rub the paint up or down, it doesn't matter so long as the canvas is covered. Manet began it, and Cézanne has--well, filed the petition: painting is bankrupt." I listened to him a little wearily, for I had heard all he was saying many times before; but Octave always talked as he wanted to talk, and this evening he wanted to talk of painting, not of Marie, and I was glad when we came to the spot where our ways parted. "You know that the Russian is coming to the studio to-morrow; I hope he'll buy the portrait." "I hope he will," I said. "I'd buy it myself if I could afford it." "I'd prefer you to have something I have done since, unless it be the woman you're after ... but one minute. You're coming to sit to me the day after to-morrow?" "Yes," I said, "I'll come." "And then I'll be able to tell you if he has bought the picture." Three days afterwards I asked Octave on the threshold if the Russian had bought the portrait, and he told me nothing had been definitely settled yet. Marie had gone to St. Petersburg with the prince, and this was the last news I had of her for many months. But a week rarely passed without something happening to remind me of her. One day a books of travels in Siberia opened at a passage telling how a boy belonging to a tribe of Asiatic savages had been taken from his deserts, where he had been found deserted and dying, and brought to Moscow. The gentleman who had found him adopted and educated him, and the reclaimed savage became in time a fashionable young man about town, betraying no trace of his origin until one day he happened to meet one of his tribe. The man had come to Moscow to sell skins; and the smell of the skins awoke a longing for the desert. The reclaimed savage grew melancholy; his adopted father tried in vain to overcome the original instinct; presents of money did not soothe his homesickness. He disappeared, and was not heard of for years until one day a caravan came back with the news of a man among the savages who had betrayed himself by speaking French. On being questioned, he denied any knowledge of French; he said he had never been to St. Petersburg, nor did he wish to go there. And what was this story but the story of Marie Pellegrin, who, when weary of Russian princes and palaces, returned for her holiday to the Quartier Bréda? A few days afterwards I heard in Barrès's studio that she had escaped from Russia; and that evening I went to Alphonsine's to dinner, hoping to see her there. But she was not there. There was no one there except Clementine and the two stockbrokers; and I waited eagerly for news of her. I did not like to mention her name, and the dreary dinner was nearly over before her name was mentioned. I heard that she was ill; no, not dying, but very ill. Alphonsine gave me her address; a little higher up on the same side as the Cirque Fernando, nearly facing the Elysée Montmartre. The number I could inquire out, she said, and I went away in a cab up the steep and stony Rue des Martyres, noticing the café and then the _brasserie_ and a little higher up the fruit-seller and the photographer. When the mind is at stress one notices the casual, and mine was at stress, and too agitated to think. The first house we stopped at happened to be the right one, and the _concierge_ said, "The fourth floor." As I went upstairs I thought of _La Glue_, of her untidy dress and her red hair, and it was she who answered the bell and asked me into an unfurnished drawing-room, and we stood by the chimneypiece. "She's talking of going to the Elysée to-night. Won't you come in? She'd like to see you. There are three or four of us here. You know them. Clementine, Margaret Byron?" And she mentioned some other names that I did not remember, and opening a door she cried: "Marie, here's a visitor for you, a gentleman from Alphonsine's. You know, dear, the Englishman, Octave Barrès's friend." She gave me her hand, and I held it a long while. "Comme les Anglais sont gentils. Dès qu'on est malade--" I don't think Marie finished the sentence, if she did I did not hear her; but I remember quite well that she spoke of my distaste for cards. "You didn't play that night at Alphonsine's when I lost all my money. You preferred to look at Victorine's drawings. She has done some better ones. Go and look at them, and let's finish our game. Then I'll talk to you. So you heard about me at Alphonsine's? They say I'm very ill, don't they? But now that I've come back I'll soon get well. I'm always well at Montmartre, amn't I, Victorine?" "Nous ne sommes pas installés encore," Marie said, referring to the scarcity of furniture, and to the clock and candelabra which stood on the floor. But if there were too few chairs, there was a good deal of money and jewellery among the bed-clothes; and Marie toyed with this jewellery during the games. She wore large lace sleeves, and the thin arms showed delicate and slight when she raised them to change her ear-rings. Her small beauty, fashioned like an ivory, contrasted with the coarse features about her, and the little nose with beautifully shaped nostrils, above all the mouth fading at the ends into faint indecisions. Every now and then a tenderness came over her face; Octave had seen the essential in her, whatever he might say; he had painted herself--her soul; and Marie's soul rose up like a water-flower in her eyes, and then the soul sank out of sight, and I saw another Marie, _une grue_, playing cards with five others from Alphonsine's, losing her money and her health. A bottle of absinthe stood on a beautiful Empire table that her prince had given her, and Bijou, Clementine's little dog, slept on an embroidered cushion. Bijou was one of those dear little Japanese or Chinese spaniels, those dogs that are like the King Charles. She was going to have puppies, and I was stroking her silky coat thinking of her coming trouble, when I suddenly heard Clementine's voice raised above the others, and looking up I saw a great animation in her face; I heard that the cards had not been fairly dealt, and then the women threw their cards aside, and _La Glue_ told Clementine that she was not wanted, that _elle ferait bien de débarrasser les planches_, that was the expression she used. I heard further accusations, and among them the plaintive voice of Marie begging of me not to believe what they said. The women caught each other by the hair, and tore at each other's faces, and Marie raised herself up in bed and implored them to cease; and then she fell back crying. For a moment it seemed as if they were going to sit down to cards again, but suddenly everybody snatched her own money and then everybody snatched at the money within her reach; and, calling each other thieves, they struggled through the door, and I heard them quarrelling all the way down the staircase. Bijou jumped from her chair and followed her mistress. "Help me to look," Marie said; and looking I saw her faint hands seeking through the bed-clothes. Some jewellery was missing, a bracelet and some pearls, as well as all her money. Marie fell back among the pillows unable to speak, and every moment I dreaded a flow of blood. She began to cry, and the little lace handkerchief was soon soaking. I had to find her another. The money that had been taken had been paid her by a _fournisseur_ in the _Quartier_, who had given her two thousand francs for her _garniture de cheminée_. A few francs were found among the bed-clothes, and these few francs, she said, were sufficient _pour passer sa soirée_, and she begged me to go the dressmaker to inquire for the gown that had been promised for ten o'clock. "I shall be at the Elysée by eleven. _Au revoir, au revoir!_ Let me rest a little now. I shall see you to-night. You know where I always sit, in the left-hand corner; they always keep those seats for me." Her eyes closed, I could see that she was already asleep, and her calm and reasonable sleep reminded me of her agitated and unreasonable life; and I stood looking at her, at this poor butterfly who was lying here all alone, robbed by her friends and associates. But she slept contentedly, having found a few francs that they had overlooked amid the bedclothes, enough to enable her to pass her evening at the Elysée! The prince might be written to; but he, no doubt, was weary of her inability to lead a respectable life, and knew, no doubt, that if he were to send her money, it would go as his last gift had gone. If she lived, Marie would one day be selling fried potatoes on the streets. And this decadence--was it her fault? Octave would say: "Qu'est ce que cela peut nous faire, une fille plus ou moins fichue ... si je pouvais réussir un peu dans ce sacré métier!" This was how he talked, but he thought more profoundly in his painting; his picture of her was something more than mere sarcasm. She was going to the Elysée to-night. It was just six o'clock, so she wanted her dress by ten. I must hasten away to the dressmaker at once; it might be wiser not--she lay in bed peaceful and beautiful; at the Elysée she would be drinking absinthe and smoking cigarettes until three in the morning. But I had promised: she wouldn't forgive me if I didn't, and I went. The dressmaker said that Madame Pellegrin would have her dress by nine, and at half-past ten I was at the Elysée waiting for her. How many times did I walk round the gravel path, wearying of the unnatural green of the chestnut leaves and of the high kicking in the quadrilles? Now and then there would be a rush of people, and then the human tide would disperse again under the trees among the zinc chairs and tables, for the enjoyment of bocks and cigars. I noticed that Marie's friends spent their evening in the left-hand corner; but they did not call me to drink with them, knowing well that I knew the money they were spending was stolen money. I left the place discontented and weary, glad in a way that Marie had not come. No doubt the dressmaker had disappointed her, or maybe she had felt too ill. There was no time to go to inquire in the morning, for I was breakfasting with Octave, and in the afternoon sitting to him. We were in the middle of the sitting, he had just sketched in my head, when we heard footsteps on the stairs. "Only some women," he said; "I've a mind not to open the door." "But do," I said, feeling sure the women were Marie's friends bringing news of her. And it was so. She had been found dead on her balcony dressed in the gown that had just come home from the dressmaker. I hoped that Octave would not try to pass the matter off with some ribald jest, and I was surprised at his gravity. "Even Octave," I said, "refrains, _on ne blague pas la mort_." "But what was she doing on the balcony?" he asked. "What I don't understand is the balcony." We all stood looking at her picture, trying to read the face. "I suppose she went out to look at the fireworks; they begin about eleven." It was one of the women who had spoken, and her remark seemed to explain the picture. CHAPTER V LA BUTTE To-morrow I shall drive to breakfast, seeing Paris continuously unfolding, prospect after prospect, green swards, white buildings, villas engarlanded; to-day I drive to breakfast through the white torridities of Rue Blanche. The back of the coachman grows drowsier, and would have rounded off into sleep long ago had it not been for the great paving stones that swing the vehicle from side to side, and we have to climb the Rue Lepic, and the poor little fainting animal will never be able to draw me to the Butte. So I dismiss my carriage, half out of pity, half out of a wish to study the Rue Lepic, so typical is it of the upper lower classes. In the Rue Blanche there are _portes-cochères_, but in Rue Lepic there are narrow doors, partially grated, open on narrow passages at the end of which, squeezed between the wall and the stairs, are small rooms where _concierges_ sit, eternally _en camisole_, amid vegetables and sewing. The wooden blinds are flung back on the faded yellow walls, revealing a portion of white bed-curtain and a heavy middle-aged woman, _en camisole_, passing between the cooking stove, in which a rabbit in a tin pail lies steeping, and the men sitting at their trades in the windows. The smell of leather follows me for several steps; a few doors farther a girl sits trimming a bonnet, her mother beside her. The girl looks up, pale with the exhausting heat. At the corner of the next street there is the _marchand de vins_, and opposite the dirty little _charbonnier_, and standing about a little hole which he calls his _boutique_ a group of women in discoloured _peignoirs_ and heavy carpet slippers. They have baskets on their arms. Everywhere traces of meagre and humble life, but nowhere do I see the demented wretch common in our London streets--the man with bare feet, the furtive and frightened creature, gnawing a crust and drawing a black, tattered shirt about his consumptive chest. The asphalt is melting, the reverberation of the stones intolerable, my feet ache and burn. At the top of the street I enter a still poorer neighbourhood, a still steeper street, but so narrow that the shadow has already begun to draw out on the pavements. At the top of the street is a stairway, and above the stairway a grassy knoll, and above the knoll a windmill lifts its black and motionless arms. For the mill is now a mute ornament, a sign for the _Bal du Moulin de la Galette_. As I ascend the street grows whiter, and at the Butte it is empty of everything except the white rays of noon. There are some dusty streets, and silhouetting against the dim sky a dilapidated façade of some broken pillars. Some stand in the midst of ruined gardens, circled by high walls crumbling and white, and looking through a broken gateway I see a fountain splashing, but nowhere the inhabitants that correspond to these houses--only a workwoman, a grisette, a child crying in the dust. The Butte Montmartre is full of suggestion; grand folk must at some time have lived there. Could it be that this place was once country? To-day it is full of romantic idleness and abandonment. On my left an iron gateway, swinging on rusty hinges, leads on to a large terrace, at the end of which is a row of houses. It is in one of these houses that my friend lives, and as I pull the bell I think that the pleasure of seeing him is worth the ascent, and my thoughts float back over the long time I have known Paul. We have known each other always, since we began to write. But Paul is not at home. The servant comes to the door with a baby in her arms, another baby! and tells me that Monsieur et Madame are gone out for the day. No breakfast, no smoke, no talk about literature, only a long walk back--cabs are not found at these heights--a long walk back through the roasting sun. And it is no consolation to be told that I should have written and warned them I was coming. But I must rest, and ask leave to do so, and the servant brings me in some claret and a siphon. The study is better to sit in than the front room, for in the front room, although the shutters are closed, the white rays pierce through the chinks, and lie like sword-blades along the floor. The study is pleasant and the wine refreshing. The house seems built on the sheer hillside. Fifty feet--more than that--a hundred feet under me there are gardens, gardens caught somehow in the hollow of the hill, and planted with trees, tall trees, for swings hang out of them, otherwise I should not know they were tall. From this window they look like shrubs, and beyond the houses that surround these gardens Paris spreads out over the plain, an endless tide of bricks and stone, splashed with white when the sun shines on some railway station or great boulevard: a dim reddish mass, like a gigantic brickfield, and far away a line of hills, and above the plain a sky as pale and faint as the blue ash of a cigarette. I can never look upon this city without strong emotion; it has been all my life to me. I came here in my youth, I relinquished myself to Paris, never extending once my adventure beyond Bas Meudon, Ville d'Avray, Fontainebleau--and Paris has made me. How much of my mind do I owe to Paris? And by thus acquiring a fatherland more ideal than the one birth had arrogantly imposed, because deliberately chosen, I have doubled my span of life. Do I not exist in two countries? Have I not furnished myself with two sets of thoughts and sensations? Ah! the delicate delight of owning _un pays ami_--a country where you may go when you are weary to madness of the routine of life, sure of finding there all the sensations of home, plus those of irresponsible caprice. The pleasure of a literature that is yours without being wholly your own, a literature that is like an exquisite mistress, in whom you find consolation for all the commonplaces of life! The comparison is perfect, for although I know these French folk better than all else in the world, they must ever remain my pleasure, and not my work in life. It is strange that this should be so, for in truth I know them strangely well. I can see them living their lives from hour to hour; I know what they would say on any given occasion. There is Paul. I understand nothing more completely than that man's mind. I know its habitual colour and every varying shade, and yet I may not make him the hero of a novel when I lay the scene in Montmartre, though I know it so well. I know when he dresses, how long he takes to dress, and what he wears. I know the breakfast he eats, and the streets down which he passes--their shape, their colour, their smell. I know exactly how life has come to him, how it has affected him. The day I met him in London! Paul in London! He was there to meet _une petite fermière_ with whom he had become infatuated when he went to Normandy to finish his novel. Paul is _foncièrement bon; he married her_, and this is their abode. There is the _salle-à-manger_, furnished with a nice sideboard in oak, and six chairs to match; on the left is their bedroom, and there is the baby's cot, a present from _le grand, le cher et illustre maître_. Paul and Mrs. Paul get up at twelve, and they loiter over breakfast; some friends come in and they loiter over les _petits verres_. About four Paul begins to write his article, which he finishes or nearly finishes before dinner. They loiter over dinner until it is time for Paul to take his article to the newspaper. He loiters in the printing office or the cafe until his proof is ready, and when that is corrected he loiters in the many cafés of the Faubourg Montmartre, smoking interminable cigars, finding his way back to the Butte between three and four in the morning. Paul is fat and of an equable temperament. He believes in naturalism all the day, particularly after a breakfast over _les petits verres_. He never said an unkind word to any one, and I am sure never thought one. He used to be fond of grisettes, but since he married he has thought of no one but his wife. _Il écrit des choses raides_, but no woman ever had a better husband. And now you know him as well as I do. Here are his own books, "The End of Lucie Pellegrin," the story that I have just finished writing: I think I must explain how it was that I have come to rewrite one of Paul's stories, the best he ever wrote. I remember asking him why he called her Lucie, and he was surprised to hear her name was Marie; he never knew her, he had never been to Alphonsine's, and he had told the story as he had picked it up from the women who turned into the Rat Mort at midnight for a _soupe à l'oignon_. He said it was a pity he did not know me when he was writing it, for I could have told him her story more sympathetically than the women in the Rat Mort, supplying him with many pretty details that they had never noticed or had forgotten. It would have been easy for me to have done this, for Marie Pellegrin is enshrined in my memory like a miniature in a case. I press a spring, and I see the beautifully shaped little head, the pale olive face, the dark eyes, and the blue-black hair. Marie Pellegrin is really part of my own story, so why should I have any scruple about telling it? Merely because my friend had written it from hearsay? Whereas I knew her; I saw her on her death-bed. Chance made me her natural historian. Now I think that every one will accept my excuses, and will acquit me of plagiarism. I see the Rougon-Macquart series, each volume presented to him by the author, Goncourt, Huysmans, Duranty, Céard, Maupassant, Hennique, etc.; in a word, the works of those with whom I grew up, those who tied my first literary pinafore round my neck. But here are "Les Moralités Legendaires" by Jules Laforgue, and "Les Illuminations" by Rambaud. Paul has not read these books; they were sent to him, I suppose, for review, and put away on the bookcase, all uncut; their authors do not visit here. And this sets me thinking that one knows very little of any generation except one's own. True that I know a little more of the symbolists than Paul. I am the youngest of the naturalists, the eldest of the symbolists. The naturalists affected the art of painting, the symbolists the art of music; and since the symbolists there has been no artistic manifestation--the game is played out. When Huysmans and Paul and myself are dead, it will be as impossible to write a naturalistic novel as to revive the megatherium. Where is Hennique? When Monet is dead it will be as impossible to paint an impressionistic picture as to revive the ichthyosaurus. A little world of ideas goes by every five-and-twenty years, and the next that emerges will be incomprehensible to me, as incomprehensible as Monet was to Corot.... Was the young generation knocking at the door of the Opéra Comique last night? If the music was the young generation, I am sorry for it. It was the second time I had gone. I had been to hear the music, and I left exasperated after the third act. A friend was with me and he left, but for different reasons; he suffered in his ears; it was my intelligence that suffered. Why did the flute play the chromatic scale when the boy said, "Il faut que cela soit un grand navire," and why were all the cellos in motion when the girl answered, "Cela ou bien tout autre chose?" I suffered because of the divorce of the orchestra and singers, uniting perhaps at the end of the scene. It was speaking through music, no more, monotonous as the Sahara, league after league, and I lost amid sands. A chord is heard in "Lohengrin" to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, and it fills its purpose, when Ortrud shrieks out the motive of the secret, and in its simplest form, at the church door, the method may be criticised as crude, but the crudest melodrama is better than this desert wandering. While I ponder on the music of the younger generation, remembering the perplexity it had caused me, I hear a vagrant singing on the other side of the terrace: [Illustration] Moi, je m'en fous, Je reste dans mon trou and I say: "I hear the truth in the mouth of the vagrant minstrel, one who possibly has no _trou_ wherein to lay his head." _Et moi aussi, je reste dans mon trou, et mon trou est assez beau pour que j'y reste, car mon trou est_--Richard Wagner. My _trou_ is the Ring--the Sacrosanct Ring. Again I fall to musing. The intention of Liszt and Wagner and Strauss was to write music. However long Wotan might ponder on Mother Earth the moment comes when the violins begin to sing; ah! how the spring uncloses in the orchestra, and the lovers fly to the woods!... The vagrant continued his wail, and forgetful of Paul, forgetful of all things but the philosophy of the minstrel of the Butte, I picked my way down the tortuous streets repeating: [Illustration] Moi, je m'en fous, Je reste dans mon trou CHAPTER VI SPENT LOVES I am going to see dear and affectionate friends. The train would take me to them, that droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_, and it seems a pity to miss the Gare St. Lazare, its Sunday morning tumult of Parisians starting with their mistresses and their wives for a favourite suburb. I never run up these wide stairways leading to the great wide galleries full of bookstalls (charming yellow notes), and pierced with little _guichets_ painted round with blue, without experiencing a sensation of happy lightness--a light-headedness that I associate with the month of May in Paris. But the tramway that passes through the Place de la Concorde goes as far as Passy, and though I love the droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_ I love this tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the garden of the Champs Elysées, through miles of chestnut bloom, the roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom, cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the current. I love this sprightly little river better than the melancholy Thames, along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes! Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens, gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the railway station is compensation; the little railway station like a house of cards under toy trees, and the train steaming out into the fanciful country. The bright wood along which it speeds is like the season's millinery. It is pleasant to notice everything in Paris, the flymen asleep on their box-seats, the little horses dozing beneath the chestnut trees, the bloused workmen leaning over a green-painted table in an arbour, drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre, the villas of Auteuil, rich woodwork, rich iron railings, and the summer hush about villas engarlanded. Auteuil is so French, its symbolism enchants me. Auteuil is like a flower, its petals opening out to the kiss of the air, its roots feeling for way among the rich earth. Ah, the land of France, its vineyards and orchards, its earthly life! Thoughts come unbidden, my thoughts sing together, and I hardly knowing what they are singing. My thoughts are singing like the sun; do not ask me their meaning; they mean as much and as little as the sun that I am part of--the sun of France that I shall enjoy for thirty days. May takes me to dear and affectionate friends who await me at Auteuil, and June takes me away from them. There is the villa! And there amid the engarlanding trees my friend, dressed in pale yellow, sits in front of his easel. How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich, long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under the great, gaudy greenery. Year after year the same affectionate welcome, the same spontaneous welcome in this garden of rhododendrons and chestnut bloom. I would linger in the garden, but I may not, for breakfast is ready _et il ne faut pas faire manquer la messe à Madame. La messe_! How gentle the word is, much gentler than our word, mass, and it shocks us hardly at all to see an old lady going away in her carriage _pour entendre la messe_. Religion purged of faith is a pleasant, almost a pretty thing. Some fruits are better dried than fresh; religion is such a one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant, familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to think the matter out--here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary itself as our helpless English chicken is; it lived to get fat without acquiring any useless knowledge or desire of life; it became a capon in tender years, and then a pipe was introduced into its mouth and it was fed by machinery until it could hardly walk, until it could only stagger to its bed, and there it lay in happy digestion until the hour came for it to be crammed again. So did it grow up without knowledge or sensation or feeling of life, moving gradually, peacefully towards its predestined end--a delicious repast! What better end, what greater glory than to be a fat chicken? The carcasses of sheep that hang in butchers' shops are beginning to horrify the conscience of Europe. To cut a sheep's throat is an offensive act, but to clip out a bird's tongue with a long pair of scissors made for the purpose is genteel. It is true that it beats its wings for a few moments, but we must not allow ourselves to be disturbed by a mere flutter of feathers. Man is merciful, and saved it from life. It grew like an asparagus! And talking of asparagus, here are some from Argenteuil thick as umbrellas and so succulent! A word about the wine. French red wines in England always seem to taste like ink, but in France they taste of the sun. Melons are better in June--that one comes, no doubt, from Algeria. It is, however, the kind I like best, the rich, red melon that one eats only in France; a thing of the moment, unrememberable; but the chicken will never be forgotten; twenty years hence I shall be talking of a chicken, that in becoming a fat chicken acquired twenty years of immortality--which of us will acquire as many? As we rise from table the doctor calls me into his studio: for he would give me an excellent cigar before he bids me good-bye, and having lighted it I follow my friend to the studio at the end of the garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern masters--Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet--is it not facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Leçon de Danse" by Degas--that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in the foreground, and their mothers are covering their shoulders with shawls--good mothers anxious for their daughters' welfare, for their advancement in life. This picture betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature. Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Yesterday I was in the Louvre, and when wearied with examination and debate--I had gone there on a special errand--I turned into the Salle Carrée for relaxation, and there wandered about, waiting to be attracted. Long ago the Mona Liza was my adventure, and I remember how Titian's "Entombment" enchanted me; another year I delighted in the smooth impartiality of a Terbourg interior; but this year Rembrandt's portrait of his wife held me at gaze. The face tells of her woman's life, her woman's weakness, and she seems conscious of the burden of her sex, and of the burden of her own special lot--she is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The emotion that this picture awakens is an almost physical emotion. It gets at you like music, like a sudden breath of perfume. When I approach, her eyes fade into brown shadow, but when I withdraw they begin telling her story. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder comes through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the fur was no trouble to Rembrandt; he did not strive for realism. It is fur, that is sufficient. Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the frame, and that hand reminds one, as the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay and made man out of it. That chin and that hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge, as Nature moulds. The picture seems as if it had been breathed upon the canvas. Did not a great poet once say that God breathed into Adam? and here it is even so. The other pictures seem dry, insignificant; the Mona Liza, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared with this portrait; I have heard that tedious smile excused on the ground that she is smiling at the nonsense she hears talked about her; that hesitating smile which held my youth in tether has come to seem but a grimace; and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe or map seen from a little distance. The Mona Liza is a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle or ballade with double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint, that arid glazing of _terre verte_, and has come into her possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose. Degas is wilting already; year after year he will wither, until one day some great prose writer will arise and transfer his spirit into its proper medium--literature. The Mona Liza and the "Leçon de Danse" are intellectual pictures; they were painted with the brains rather than with the temperaments; and what is any intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Leonardo made roads; Degas makes witticisms. Yesterday I heard one that delighted me far more than any road would, for I have given up bicycling. Somebody was saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it, he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh 'That is my fault!'" My reverie is broken by the piano; my friend is playing, and it is pleasant to listen to music in this airy studio. But there are women I must see, women whom I see every time I go to Paris, and too much time has been spent in the studio--I must go. But where shall I go? My thoughts strike through the little streets of Passy, measuring the distance between Passy and the Arc de Triomphe. For a moment I think that I might sit under the trees and watch the people returning from the races. Were she not dead I might stop at her little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How wonderful the touch is; the beads--how well they are rendered! And while thinking of the extraordinary handicraft I remember his studio, and the tall fair woman like a tea-rose coming into it: Mary Laurant! The daughter of a peasant, and the mistress of all the great men--perhaps I should have said of all the distinguished men. I used to call her _toute la lyre_. The last time I saw her we talked about Manet. She said that every year she took the first lilac to lay upon his grave. Is there one of her many lovers who brings flowers to her grave? What was so rememberable about her was her pleasure in life, and her desire to get all the pleasure, and her consciousness of her desire to enjoy every moment of her life. Evans, the great dentist, settled two thousand a year upon her, and how angry he was one night on meeting Manet on the staircase! In order to rid herself of her lover she invited him to dinner, intending to plead a sick headache after dinner.... She must go and lie down. But as soon as her guest was gone she took off the _peignoir_ which hid her ball dress and signed to Manet, who was waiting at the street corner, with her handkerchief. But as they went downstairs together whom should they meet but the dentist _qui a oublié ses carnets_. And he was so disappointed at meeting his beautiful but deceitful mistress that he didn't visit her again for three or four days. His anger mattered very little to Mary. Someone else settled two thousand a year more upon her; and having four thousand a year or thereabouts, she dedicated herself to the love and conversation of those who wrote books and music and painted pictures. We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination, at least the imagination stimulates the senses, acting as a sort of adjuvant. The barmaid falls in love with No. 1 because he wipes a glass better than No. 2, and Mary fell in love with Coppée on account of his sonnet "Le Lys," and she grew indifferent when he wrote poems like "La Nourrice" or "Le petit épicier de Montrouge qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie." And it was at this time when their love story was at wane that I became a competitor. But one day Madame Albazi came to Manet's studio, a splendid creature in a carriage drawn by Russian horses from the Steppes, so she said; but who can tell whether a horse comes from the Steppes or from the horse-dealers? Nor does it matter when the lady is extraordinarily attractive, when she inspires the thought--a mistress for Attila! That is not exactly how Manet saw her: but she looks like that in his pastel. In it she holds a tortoiseshell fan widespread across her bosom, and it was on one of the sticks of the fan that he signed his name. A great painter always knows where to sign his pictures, and he never signs twice in the same place. The merit of these Russians is that they never leave one in doubt. She could not sit that day, she was going to the Bois, and asked me and a young man who happened to be in Manet's studio at the time to go there with her, and we went there drawn by the Russian horses, the young man and I wondering all the while which was going to be the countess's lover; we played hard for her; but that day I was wiser than he; I let him talk and recite poetry and jingle out all the aphorisms that he had been collecting for years, feeling his witticisms were in vain, for she was dark as a raven and I was as gold as a sunflower. It was at the corner of the Rue Pontière that we got rid of him. Some days afterwards she sat to Manet. The pastel now hangs in the room of a friend of mine; I bought it for him. The picture of a woman one knows is never so agreeable a companion as the picture of a woman one has never seen. One's memory and the painter's vision are in conflict, and I like to think better of the long delicate nose, and the sparkling eyes, and a mouth like red fruit. The pastel once belonged to me; it used to hang in my rooms; for with that grace of mind which never left him, Manet said one day, "I always promised you a picture," and searching among the pastels that lined the wall he turned to me saying, "Now I think that this comes to you by right." When I left Paris hurriedly, and left my things to be sold, the countess came to the sale and bought her picture, and then she sold it years afterwards to a picture-dealer, tempted by the price that Manet's pictures were fetching. Hearing that it was for sale, I bought it, as I have said, for a friend. And now I have told the whole story, forgetting nothing except that it was years afterwards, when I had written "Les Confessions d'un jeune Anglais" in the _Revue Indépendante_, that Mary Laurant asked me--oh! she was very enterprising; she sent the editor of the _Revue_ to me; an appointment was made. She was wonderful in the garden. She said the moment I arrived, "Now, my dear ----, you must go," and we walked about, I listening to her aphorisms. Mary was beautiful, but she liked one to love her for her wit, to admire her wit; and when I asked her why she did not leave Evans, the great dentist, she said, "That would be a base thing to do. I content myself by deceiving him," and then--this confidence seemed to have a particular significance--"I am not a woman," she said, "that is made love to in a garden." Her garden was a nook at the fortifications, hidden among lilac bushes. She wished to show me her house, and we talked for a long time in her boudoir. But I knew she was Mallarmé's mistress at the time, so nothing came of this _caprice littéraire_. My thoughts run upon women, and why not? On what would you have them run? on copper mines? Woman is the legitimate subject of all men's thoughts. We pretend to be interested in other things. In the smoking-rooms I have listened to men talking about hunting, and I have said to myself, "Your interest is a pretence: of what woman are you thinking?" We forget women for a little while when we are thinking about art, but only for a while. The legitimate occupation of man's mind is woman; and listening to my friend who is playing music--music I do not care to hear, Brahms--I fall to thinking which of the women I have known in years past would interest me most to visit. In the spring weather the walk from Passy to the Champs Elysées would be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country, that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I should be interested in all these things, but my real interest would be in one little hillside, a line of houses, eight or nine, close by the Arc de Triomphe, the most ordinary in the avenue. She liked the ordinary, and I have often wondered what was the link of association? Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more, but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons. The other child is of a stricter nature, and even in the picture her slightly darkened ringlets are less wanton than her sister's. Her eyes are more pensive, and any one could have predicted children for one and cotillon favours for the other. We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer, and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June, her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading. "Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago, and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish? But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit. If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next? In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come out of a world of perfume and lace. * * * * * In imagination I have descended the Champs Elysées, and have crossed the Place de la Concorde, and the Seine is flowing past just as it flowed when the workmen were building Notre Dame, just as it will flow a thousand years hence. A thousand years hence men will stand watching its current, thinking of little blonde women, and the shudder they can send through the flesh; they can, but not twenty years afterwards. The Reverend Donne has it that certain ghosts do not raise the hair but the flesh; mine do no more than to set me thinking that rivers were not created to bear ships to the sea, but to set our memories flowing. Full many a time have I crossed the Pont Neuf on my way to see another woman--an American! The time comes when desire wilts and dies, but the sexual interest never dies, and we take pleasure in thinking in middle life of those we enjoyed in youth. She, of whom I am thinking, lives far away in the Latin Quarter, in an ill-paven street. How it used to throw my carriage from side to side! I have been there so often that I know all the shops, and where the shops end, and there is a whitewashed wall opposite her house; the street bends there. The _concierge_ is the same, a little thicker, a little heavier; she always used to have a baby in her arms, now there are no more babies; her children, I suppose, have grown up and have gone away. There used to be a darkness at the foot of the stairs, and I used to slip on those stairs, so great was my haste; the very tinkle of the bell I remember, and the trepidation with which I waited. Her rooms looked as if they had never been sat in; even the studio was formal, and the richly-bound volumes on the tables looked as if they had never been opened. She only kept one servant, a little, redheaded girl, and seeing this girl back again after an absence of many years, I spoke to Lizzie of the old days. Lizzie told me her servant's story. She had gone away to be married, and after ten years of misfortune she had returned to her old mistress, this demure, discreet and sly New Englander, who concealed a fierce sensuality under a homely appearance. Lizzie must have had many lovers, but I knew nothing of her except her sensuality, for she had to let me into that secret. She was a religious woman, a devout Protestant, and thinking of her my thoughts are carried across the sea, and I am in the National Gallery looking at Van Eyke's picture, studying the grave sensuality of the man's face--he speaks with uplifted hand like one in a pulpit, and the gesture and expression tell us as plainly as if we heard him that he is admonishing his wife (he is given to admonition), informing her that her condition--her new pregnancy--is an act of the Divine Will. She listens, but how curiously! with a sort of partial comprehension afloat upon her face, more of the guinea-pig than of the rabbit type. The twain are sharply differentiated, and one of the objects of the painter seems to have been to show us how far one human being may be removed from another. The husband is painfully clear to himself, the wife is happily unconscious of herself. Now everything in the picture suggests order; the man's face tells a mind the same from day to day, from year to year, the same passions, the same prayers; his apparel, the wide-brimmed hat, the cloak falling in long straight folds, the peaked shoon, are an habitual part of him. We see little of the room, but every one remembers the chandelier hanging from the ceiling reflected in the mirror opposite. These reflections have lasted for three hundred years; they are the same to-day as the day they were painted, and so is the man; he lives again, he is a type that Nature never wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this woman waiting for me by an oak table, a little ashamed of her thoughts, but unable to overcome them. Once I heard her playing the piano, and it struck me as an affectation. As I let my thoughts run back things forgotten emerge; here comes one of her gowns! a dark-green gown, the very same olive green as the man's cloak. She wore her hair short like a boy's, and though it ran all over her head in little curls, it did not detract at all from the New England type, the woman in whose speech Biblical phraseology still lingers. Lizzie was a miraculous survival of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in the _Mayflower_ and settled in New England. Paris had not changed her. She was _le grave Puritan du tableau_. The reader will notice that I write _le grave Puritan_, for of his submissive, childlike wife there was nothing in Lizzie except her sex. As her instinct was in conflict with her ideals, her manner was studied, and she affected a certain cheerfulness which she dared not allow to subside. She never relinquished her soul, never fell into confidence, so in a sense we always remained strangers, for it is when lovers tell their illusions and lonelinesses that they know each other, the fiercest spasm tells us little, and it is forgotten, whereas the moment when a woman sighs and breaks into a simple confidence is remembered years afterwards, and brings her before us though she be underground or a thousand miles away. These intimacies she had not, but there was something true and real in her, something which I cannot find words to express to-day; she was a clever woman, that was it, and that is why I pay her the homage of an annual visit. These courteous visits began twenty years ago; they are not always pleasant, yet I endure them. Our conversation is often laboured, there are awkward and painful pauses, and during these pauses we sit looking at each other, thinking no doubt of the changes that time has wrought. One of her chief charms was her figure--one of the prettiest I have ever seen--and she still retains a good deal of its grace. But she shows her age in her hands; they have thickened at the joints, and they were such beautiful hands. Last year she spoke of herself as an old woman, and the remark seemed to me disgraceful and useless, for no man cares to hear a woman whom he has loved call herself old; why call attention to one's age, especially when one does not look it? and last year she looked astonishingly young for fifty-five; that was her age, she said. She asked me my age; the question was unpleasant, and before I was aware of it I had told her a lie, and I hate those who force me to tell lies. The interview grew painful, and to bring it to a close she asked me if I would care to see her husband. We found the old man alone in his studio, looking at an engraving under the light of the lamp, much more like a picture than any of his paintings. She asked him if he remembered me, and he got up muttering something, and to help him I mentioned that I had been one of his pupils. The dear old man said of course he remembered, and that he would like to show me his pictures, but Lizzie said--I suppose it was nervousness that made her say it, but it was a strangely tactless remark--"I don't think, dear, that Mr. ---- cares for your pictures." However celebrated one may be, it is always mortifying to hear that some one, however humble the person may be, does not care for one's art. But I saved the situation, and I think my remarks were judicious and witty. It is not always that one thinks of the right words at the right moment, but it would be hard to improve on the admonition that she did me a wrong, that, like every one who liked art, I had changed my opinion many times, but after many wanderings had come back to the truth, and in order to deceive the old man I spoke of Ingres. I had never failed in that love, and how could I love Ingres without loving him? The contrary was the truth, but the old man's answer was very sweet. Forgetful of his own high position, he answered, "We may both like Ingres, but it is not probable that we like the same Ingres." I said I did not know any Ingres I did not admire, and asked him which he admired, and we had a pleasant conversation about the Apotheosis of Homer, and the pictures in the Musée de Montauban. Then the old man said, "I must show Mr. ---- my pictures." No doubt he had been thinking of them all through the conversation about the Musée de Montauban. "I must show you my Virgin," and he explained that the face of the Infant Jesus was not yet finished. It was wonderful to see this old man, who must have been nearly eighty, taking the same interest in his pictures as he took fifty years ago. Some stupid reader will think, perchance, that it mattered that I had once loved his wife. But how could such a thing matter? Think for a moment, dear reader, for all readers are dear, even the stupidest, and you will see that you are still entangled in conventions and prejudices. Perhaps, dear reader, you think she and I should have dropped on our knees and confessed. Had we done so, he would have thought us two rude people, and nothing more. What will happen to her when he dies? Will she return to Boston? Shall I ever see her again? Last year I vowed that I would not, and I think it would please her as well if I stayed away.... And she is right, for so long as I am not by her she is with me. But in the same room, amid the familiar furniture, we are divided by the insuperable past, and to retain her I must send her away. The idea is an amusing one; I think I have read it somewhere, it seems to me like something I have read. Did I ever read of a man who sent his mistress away so that his possession might be more complete? Whether I did or didn't matters little, the idea is true to me to-day--in order to possess her I must never see her again. A pretty adventure it would be, nevertheless, to spend a week paying visits to those whom I loved about that time; and I can imagine a sort of Beau Brummel of the emotions going every year to Paris to spend a day with each of his mistresses. There were others about that time. There was Madame ----. The name is in itself beautiful, characteristically French, and it takes me back to the middle centuries, to the middle of France. I always imagined that tall woman, who thought so quickly and spoke so sincerely, dealing out her soul rapidly, as one might cards, must have been born near Tours. She was so French that she must have come from the very heart of France; she was French as the wine of France; as Balzac, who also came from Tours; and her voice, and her thoughts, and her words transported one; by her side one was really in France; and, as her lover, one lived through every circumstance of a French love story. She lived in what is called in Paris an hotel; it had its own _concierge_, and it was nice to hear the man say, "Oui, monsieur, Madame la Marquise est chez elle," to walk across a courtyard and wait in a boudoir stretched with blue silk, to sit under a Louis XVI. rock crystal chandelier. She said one day, "I'm afraid you're thinking of me a great deal," and she leaned her hands on the back of the chair, making it easy for me to take them. She said her hands had not done any kitchen work for five hundred years, and at the time that seemed a very witty thing to say. The drawing-room opened onto a conservatory twenty feet high; it nearly filled the garden, and the marquise used to receive her visitors there. I do not remember who was the marquise's lover when the last fête was given, nor what play was acted; only that the ordinary guests lingered over their light refreshments, scenting the supper, and that to get rid of them we had to bid the marquise ostentatiously goodnight. Creeping round by the back of the house, we gained the bedrooms by the servants' staircase, and hid there until the ordinary guests in decency could delay no longer. As soon as the last one was gone the stage was removed, and the supper tables were laid out. Shall I ever forget the moment when the glass roof of the conservatory began to turn blue, and the shrilling of awakening sparrows! How haggard we all were, but we remained till eight in the morning. That fête was paid for with the last remnant of the poor marquise's fortune. Afterwards she was very poor, and Suzanne, her daughter, went on the stage and discovered a certain talent for acting which has been her fortune to this day. I will go to the Vaudeville to-night to see her; we might arrange to go together to see her mother's grave. To visit the grave, and to strew azaleas upon it, would be a pretty piece of sentimental mockery. But for my adventure there should be seven visits; Madame ---- would make a fourth; I hear that she is losing her sight, and lives in a chateau about fifty miles from Paris, a chateau built in the time of Louis XIII., with high-pitched roofs and many shutters, and formal gardens with balustrades and fish-ponds, yes _et des charmilles--charmilles_--what is that in English?--avenues of clipped limes. To walk in an avenue of clipped limes with a woman who is nearly blind, and talk to her of the past, would be indeed an adventure far "beyond the range of formal man's emotion." Madame ---- interrupted our love story. She would be another--that would be five--and I shall think of two more during dinner. But now I must be moving on; the day has ended; Paris is defining itself upon a straw-coloured sky. I must go, the day is done; and hearing the last notes trickle out--somebody has been playing the prelude to "Tristan"--I say: "Another pretty day passed, a day of meditation on art and women--and what else is there to meditate about? To-morrow will happily be the same as to-day, and to-morrow I shall again meditate on art and women, and the day after I shall be occupied with what I once heard dear old M'Cormac, Bishop of Galway, describe in his sermon as 'the degrading passion of "loave."'" CHAPTER VII NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE The day dies in sultry languor. A warm night breathes upon the town, and in the exhaustion of light and hush of sound, life strikes sharply on the ear and brain. It was early in the evening when I returned home, and, sitting in the window, I read till surprised by the dusk; and when my eyes could no longer follow the printed page, holding the book between finger and thumb, my face resting on the other hand, I looked out on the garden, allowing my heart to fill with dreams. The book that had interested me dealt with the complex technique of the art of the Low Countries--a book written by a painter. It has awakened in me memories of all kinds, heartrending struggles, youthful passion, bitter disappointments; it has called into mind a multitude of thoughts and things, and, wearied with admiring many pictures and arguing with myself, I am now glad to exchange my book for the gentle hallucinations of the twilight. I see a line of leafage drawn across the Thames, but the line dips, revealing a slip of grey water with no gleam upon it. Warehouses and a factory chimney rise ghostly and grey, and so cold is that grey tint that it might be obtained with black and white; hardly is the warmth of umber needed. Behind the warehouses and the factory chimney the sky is murky and motionless, but higher up it is creamy white, and there is some cloud movement. Four lamps, two on either side of the factory chimney, look across the river; one constantly goes out--always the same lamp--and a moment after it springs into its place again. Across my window a beautiful branch waves like a feather fan. It is the only part of the picture worked out in detail. I watch its soft and almost imperceptible swaying, and am tempted to count the leaves. Below it, and a little beyond it, between it and the river, night gathers in the gardens; and there, amid serious greens, passes the black stain of a man's coat, and, in a line with the coat, in the beautifully swaying branch, a belated sparrow is hopping from twig to twig, awakening his mates in search for a satisfactory resting-place. In the sharp towers of Temple Gardens the pigeons have gone to sleep. I can see the cots under the conical caps of slate. The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual memories, but the one before me rises for the first time--for fifteen years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it rises--the Countess Ninon de Calvador's boudoir! Her boudoir or her drawing-room, be that as it may, the room into which I was ushered many years ago when I went to see her. I was then a young man, very thin, with sloping shoulders, and that pale gold hair that Manet used to like to paint. I had come with a great bouquet for Ninon, for it was _son jour de fête_, and was surprised and somewhat disappointed to meet a large brunette with many creases in her neck, a loose and unstayed bosom; one could hardly imagine Ninon dressed otherwise than in a _peignoir_--a blue _peignoir_ seemed inevitable. She was sitting by a dark, broad-shouldered young man when I came in; they were sitting close together; he rose out of a corner and showed me an impressionistic picture of a railway station. He was one of the many young men who at that time thought the substitution of dots of pink and yellow for the grey and slate and square brushwork of Bastien Lepage was the certain way to paint well. I learned afterwards, during the course of the evening, that he was looked at askance, for even in Montmartre it was regarded as a dishonour to allow the lady with whom you lived to pay for your dinner. Villiers de L'Isle Adam, who had once been Ninon's lover, answered the reproaches levelled against him for having accepted too largely of her hospitality with, "Que de bruit pour quelques côtelettes!" and his transgressions were forgiven him for the sake of the _mot_ which seemed to summarise the moral endeavour and difficulties of the entire quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He talks like the _concierge_ in my story of 'Les Demoiselles de Bienfillatre.'" Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon's temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were the _ratés_ she entertained less amusing than the people one meets in Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce another, that is common practice, but at Ninon's there was a restriction which I never met elsewhere--no friend could bring another unless the newcomer was a _raté_--in other words, unless he had written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there. The windows of Ninon's boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood, and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice. "That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera," I said; "she sings all the different parts--soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass." At this time we were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon's cat that had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was whispered that she was the wife of a rich _commerçant_ at Tours. This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were celebrated. "Who is he--that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey trousers and a black jacket?--oh!" My companion's exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm), and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned away, thinking to leave them together--"If I were in love with a young girl or with a young man?" My companion ran forward quickly and seized my arm. "You must not leave me with him," she said. On account of his genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of himself--all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure; so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was astonished at the perception she showed. "Is he a priest? I mean, was he ever a priest?" "A sort of cross between a thieves' kitchen and a presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses in the French language--a sort of ambling song like a robin's. You have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine's. His gift is a vision of his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,--there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead--Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate; the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head, and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas--the curse of modern literature--and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get the real taste of life--the aroma as from a wine that has been many years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but he quickly recovers. 'After all, I have written a good many volumes.' 'And what would art be without life, without love?' He has a verse on that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a birch bending over a lake's edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses, Ton âme est un lac d'amour Dont mes pensêes sont les cygnes. Vois comme ils font le tour.... were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all, having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin's little homily. Oui, c'était par un soir joyeux de cabaret, Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l'on dirait Que le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perte Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte. On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordéon Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence. Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danse Vomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j'étais, Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais, S'il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire. Tu t'écrias 'Dieu, qu'il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!' "She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well beloved used to get drunk. "Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive, Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant." "But how can a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I said: "Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet's. It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals--yes, and in prison." "In prison! But he didn't steal, did he?" and the _commerçant's_ wife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went towards her pocket. "No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling in love with drabs." Dans ces femmes d'ailleurs je n'ai pas trouvé l'ange Qu'il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi! L'une, fille du Nord, native d'un Crotoy, Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle; Elle ne m'adressa guère qu'une parole Et c'était d'un petit cadeau qu'il s'agissait, En revanche, dans son accent d'ail et de poivre, Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre, Affectait de dandinement des matelots Et m'... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots, Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommage La quatrième était sage comme une image, Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois: Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix! Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoire Surnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l'histoire Connue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis "l'îlot" Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falot Les terasses l'été, l'hiver les brasseries Et par degrés l'humble trottoir en théories En attendant les bons messieurs compatissants Capables d'un louis et pas trop repoussants _Qutorum ego parva pars erim_, me disais-je. Mais toutes, comme la première du cortège, Dès avant la bougie éteinte et le rideau Tiré, n'oubliaient pas le "mon petit cadeau." "In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says, 'The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!'" "But do you know any of these women?" "Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him." The _commerçante's_ wife asked if she were here. "He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon's lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to explain to the poet that Sara's intemperance rendered her impossible in respectable society. 'I know Sara has her faults,' he murmured in reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that others did not see Sara with his eyes. 'I know she has her faults,' he repeated, 'and so have others. We all have our faults.' And it was a long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought him." "And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his goat-like beard." "That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would understand." "Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his music, I suppose?" "Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished--ah, you should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain, and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness, his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his music accompanies his own verses." "Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?" "Now you're asking me the question we've been asking ourselves for the last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is the celebrated Villiers de L'Isle Adam." And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all I knew about Villiers. "He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a raté," I said. But the woman was not so simple as I had imagined, and one or two questions she put to me led me to tell her that Villiers's genius only appeared in streaks, like gold in quartz. "The comparison is an old one, but there is no better one to explain Villiers, for when he is not inspired his writing is very like quartz." "His great name----" "His name is part of his genius. He chose it, and it has influenced his writings. Have I not heard him say, 'Car je porte en moi les richesses stériles d'un grand nombre de rois oubliés.'" "But is he a legitimate descendant?" "Legitimate in the sense that he desired the name more than any of those who ever bore it legitimately." At that moment Villiers passed by me, and I introduced him to her, and very soon he began to tell us that his _Eve_ had just been published, and the success of it was great. "On m'a dit hier de passer à la caisse ... l'edition était épuisée, vous voyez--il paraît, la fortune est venue ... même à moi." But Villiers was often tiresomely talkative about trifles, and as soon as I got the chance I asked him if he were going to tell us one of his stories, reminding him of one I had heard he had been telling lately in the _brasseries_ about a man in quest of a quiet village where he could get rest, a tired composer, something of that kind. Had he written it? No, he had not written it yet, but now that he knew I liked it he would get up earlier to-morrow. Some one took him away from us, and I had to tell my companion the story. "Better," I said, "he should never write it, for half of it exists in his voice, and in his gestures, and every year he gets less and less of himself onto the paper. One has to hear him tell his stories in the café--how well he tells them! You must hear him tell how a man, recovering from a long illness, is advised by his doctor to seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to be robbers and assassins. "He would escape but he dare not, for he is being followed, so turning on his pursuers he asks them if they can direct him to a lodging. The point of Villiers's story is how a suspicion begins in the man's mind, how it grows like a cancer, and very soon the villagers are convinced he is an anarchist, and that his trunks are full of material for the manufacture of bombs. And this is why they dare not touch them. So they follow him to the farmhouse whither they have directed him, and tell their fears to the farmer and his wife. Villiers can improvise the consultations in the kitchen; at midnight in the café, but when morning comes he cannot write, his brain is empty. You must come some night to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear him; leaning across the table he will tell the terror of the hinds and farmer, how they are sure the house is going to be blown up. The sound of their feet on the staircase inspires terror in the wretched convalescent. He sits up in bed, listening, great drops of sweat collected on his forehead. He dare not get out of bed, but he must; and Villiers can suggest the sound of feet on the creaking stairs--yes, and the madness of the man piling furniture against the door, and the agony of those outside hearing the noise within. When they break into the room they find a dead man; for terror has killed him. You must come to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear Villiers tell his story. I'll meet you there to-morrow night.... Will you dine with me? The dinner there is not really too bad; perhaps you'll be able to bear with it." The _commerçant's_ wife hesitated. She promised to come, and she came; but she did not prove an interesting mistress; why, I cannot remember, and I am glad to put her out of my mind, for I want to think of the strange poet whom we heard reciting verses, under the aspen, in which one of the apes had taken refuge. Through the dimness of the years I can see his fair hair floating about his shoulders, his blue eyes and his thin nose. Didn't somebody once describe him as a sort of sensual Christ? He, too, was after the _commerçant's_ wife. And didn't he select her as the subject of his licentious verses--reassure yourself, reader, licentious merely from the point of view of prosody. "Ta nuque est de santal sur les vifs frissons d'or. Mais c'est une autre, que j'adore." The _commerçant's_ wife, forgetful of me, charmed by the poet, by the excitement of hearing herself made a subject of a poem, drew nearer. Strange, is it not, that I should remember a few words here and there? "Il m'aime, il m'aime pas, et selon l'antique rite Elle effleurait la Marguerite." The women still sit, circlewise, as if enchanted, the night inspires him, and he improvises trifle after trifle. One remembers fragments. Some time afterwards Cabaner was singing the song of "The Salt Herring." "He came along holding in his hands dirty, dirty, dirty, A big nail pointed, pointed, pointed, And a hammer heavy, heavy, heavy. He placed the ladder high, high, high, Against the wall white, white, white. He went up the ladder high, high, high, Placed the nail pointed, pointed, pointed Against the wall--toc! toc! toc! He tied to the nail a string long, long, long, And at the end of it a salt herring, dry, dry, dry, And letting fall the hammer heavy, heavy, heavy, He got down from the ladder high, high, high, And went away, away, away. Since then at the end of the string long, long, long, A salt herring dry, dry, dry, Has been swinging slowly, slowly, slowly. Now I have composed this story simple, simple, simple, To make all serious men mad, mad, mad, And to amuse children, little, little, little." This was the libretto on which Cabaner wrote music "that Wagner would not understand, but which Liszt certainly would." Dear, dear Cabaner, how well I can see thee with thy goat-like beard, and the ape in the tree interrupting thee; he was not like Liszt, he chattered all night. Poor ape, he broke his chain earlier in the evening, and it was found impossible to persuade him to come down. The brute seemed somehow determined that we should not hear Cabaner. Soon after the cocks began answering each other, though it was but midnight; and so loud was their shrilling that I awoke, surprised to find myself sitting at my window in King's Bench Walk. A moment ago I was in Madame Ninon de Calvador's garden, and every whit as much as I am now in King's Bench Walk. Madame Ninon de Calvador--what has become of her? Is the rest of her story unknown? As I sit looking into the darkness, a memory suddenly springs upon me. Villiers, who came in when dinner was half over, brought a young man with him. Fumbling at his shirt collar, apologising for being late, assuring us that he had dined, he introduced his friend to the company as a young man of genius, of extraordinary genius. Don't I remember Villiers's nervous, hysterical voice! Don't I remember the journalist's voice when he asked Ninon's lover if he sold his pictures, creating at once a bad impression? By some accident a plate was given to him, out of which one of the cats had been fed. The plate might have been given to any one else: Villiers would not have minded, and as for Cabaner, he never knew what he was eating; but it was given to the journalist. Now I remember the young man misconducted himself badly; he struck the table with his fist, and said, "Et bien, je casse tout." Yes, it was he who wrote the article entitled "Ninon's Table d'hôte" in the _Gil Blas_, and from it she learned for the first time how the world viewed her hospitality, how misinterpreted were her efforts to benefit the arts and the artists. Somebody told me this story: who I cannot tell; it is all so long ago. But it seems to me that I remember hearing that it was this article that killed her. The passing of things is always a moving subject for meditation, and it is strange how accident will bring back a scene, explicit in every detail--a tree taking shape upon the dawning sky, the hairy ugliness of the ape in its branches, and along the grey grass a waddling squad of the ducks betaking themselves to the pond, a poet talking to a _commerçant's_ wife, Madame de Calvador leaning on a lover's arm. Had I a palette I could match the blue of the _peignoir_ with the faint grey sky. I could make a picture out of that dusky suburb. Had I a pen I could write verses about these people of old time, but the picture would be a shrivelled thing compared with the dream, and the verses would limp. The moment I sought a pen the pleasure of the meditation, which is still with me, which still endures, would vanish. Better to sit by my window and enjoy what remains of the mood and the memory. The mood has nearly passed, the desire of action is approaching.... I would give much for another memory, but memory may not be beckoned, and my mind is dark now, dark as that garden; the swaying, fan-like bough by my window is nearly one mass of green; the last sparrow has fallen asleep. I hear nothing.... I hear a horse trotting in the Strand. CHAPTER VIII THE LOVERS OF ORELAY I had come a thousand miles--rather more, nearly fifteen hundred--in the hope of picking up the thread of a love story that had got entangled some years before and had been broken off abruptly. A strange misadventure our love story had been; for Doris had given a great deal of herself while denying me much, so much that at last, in despair, I fled from a one-sided love affair; too one-sided to be borne any longer, at least by me. And it was difficult to fly from her pretty, inveigling face, delightful and winsome as the faces one finds on the panels of the early German masters. One may look for her face and find it on an oak panel in the Frankfort Gallery, painted in pale tints, the cheeks faintly touched with carmine. In the background of these pictures there are all sorts of curious things; very often a gold bower with roses clambering up everywhere. Who was that master who painted cunning virgins in rose bowers? The master of Cologne, was it not? I have forgotten. No matter. Doris's hair was darker than the hair of those virgins, a rich gold hair, a mane of hair growing as luxuriously as the meadows in June. And the golden note was continued everywhere, in the eyebrows, in the pupils of the eyes, in the freckles along her little nose so firmly and beautifully modelled about the nostrils; never was there a more lovely or affectionate mouth, weak and beautiful as a flower; and the long hands were curved like lilies. There is her portrait, dear reader, prettily and truthfully and faithfully painted by me, the portrait of a girl I left one afternoon in London more than seventeen years ago, and whom I had lost sight of, I feared for ever. Thought of her? Yes, I thought of her occasionally. Time went by, and I wondered if she were married. What her husband was like, and why I never wrote. It were surely unkind not to write.... Reader, you know those little regrets. Perhaps life would be all on the flat without regret. Regret is like a mountaintop from which we survey our dead life, a mountaintop on which we pause and ponder, and very often looking into the twilight we ask ourselves whether it would be well to send a letter or some token. Now we had agreed upon one which should be used in case of an estrangement--a few bars of Schumann's melody, "The Nut Bush," should be sent, and the one who received it should at once hurry to the side of the other and all difference should be healed. But this token was never sent by me, perhaps because I did not know how to scribble the musical phrase: pride perhaps kept her from sending it; in any case five years are a long while, and she seemed to have died out of my life altogether; but one day the sight of a woman who had known her, brought her before my eyes, and I asked if Doris married. The woman could not tell me; she had not seen her for many years; they, too, were estranged, and I went home saying to myself: "Doris must be married. What sort of a husband has she chosen? Is she happy? Has she a baby? Oh, shameful thought!" Do you remember, dear reader, how Balzac, when he had come to the last page of "Massimilla Doni," declares that he dare not tell you the end of this adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal: "Massimilla Doni was expecting." Then in a passage that is pleasanter to think about than to read--for Balzac when he spoke about art was something of a sciolist, and I am not sure that the passage is altogether grammatical--he tells how the ideas of all the great artists, painters, and sculptors--the ideas they have wrought on panels and in stone--escaped from their niches and their frames--all these disembodied maidens gathered round Massimilla's bed and wept. It would be as disgraceful for Doris to be "expecting" as it was for Massimilla Doni, and I like to think of all the peris, the nymphs, the sylphs, the fairies of ancient legend, all her kinsfolk gathering about her bed, deploring her condition, regarding her as lost to them--were such a thing to happen I should certainly kneel there in spirit with them. And feeling just as Balzac did about Massimilla Doni, that it was a sacrilege that Doris should be "expecting" or even married, I wrote, omitting, however, to tell her why I had suddenly resolved to break silence; I sent her a little note, only a few words, that I was sorry not to have heard of her for so long a time; but though we had been estranged she had not been forgotten; a little commonplace note, relieved perhaps by a touch of wistfulness, of regret. And this note was sent by a messenger duly instructed to ask for an answer. The news the messenger brought back was somewhat disappointing. The lady was away, but the letter would be forwarded to her. "She is not married," I thought; "were she married her name would be sent to me.... Perhaps not." Other thoughts came into my mind, and I did not think of her again for the next two days, not till a long telegram was put into my hand. Doris! It had come from her. It had come more than a thousand miles, "regardless of expense." I said, "This telegram must have cost her ten or twelve shillings at the least." She was delighted to hear from me; she had been ill, but was better now, and the telegram concluded with the usual "Am writing." The letter that arrived, two days afterwards, was like herself, full of impulse and affection; but it contained one phrase which put black misgiving into my heart. In her description of her illness and her health, which was returning, and how she had come to be staying in this far-away Southern town, she alluded to its dulness, saying that if I came there virtue must be its own reward. "Stupid of her to speak to me of virtue," I muttered, "for she must know well enough that it was her partial virtue that had separated us and caused this long estrangement." And I sat pondering, trying to discover if she applied the phrase to herself or to the place where she was staying. How could it apply to the place? All places would be a paradise if---- At the close of a long December evening I wrote a letter, the answer to which would decide whether I should go to her, whether I should undertake the long journey. "The journey back will be detestable," I muttered, and taking up the pen again I wrote: "Your letter contains a phrase which fills me with dismay: you say, 'Virtue must be its own reward,' and this would seem that you are determined to be more aggressively Platonic than ever. Doris, this is ill news indeed; you would not have me consider it good news, would you?" Other letters followed, but I doubt if I knew more of Doris's intentions when I got into the train than I did when I sat pondering by my fireside, trying to discover her meaning when she wrote that vile phrase, "Virtue must be its own reward." But somehow I seemed to have come to a decision, and that was the main thing. We act obeying a law deep down in our being, a law which in normal circumstances we are not aware of. I asked myself as I drove to the station, if it were possible that I was going to undertake a journey of more than a thousand miles in quest--of what? Doris's pretty face! It might be pretty no longer; yet she could not have changed much. She had said she was sure that in ten minutes we should be talking just as in old times. Even so, none but madmen travel a thousand miles in search of a pretty face. And it was the madman that is in us all that was propelling me, or was it the primitive man who crouches in some jungle of our being? Of one thing I was sure, that I was no longer a conventional citizen of the nineteenth century; I had gone back two or three thousand years, for all characteristic traits, everything whereby I knew myself, had disappeared! Yet I seemed to have met myself somewhere, in some book or poem or opera.... I could not remember at first, but after some time I began to perceive a shadowy similarity between myself and--dare I mention the names?--the heroes of ancient legend--Menelaus or Jason--which? Both had gone a thousand miles on Beauty's quest. The colour of Helen's hair isn't mentioned in either the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey." Jason's quest was a golden fleece, and so was mine. And it was the primitive hero that I had discovered in myself that helped me to face the idea of the journey, for there is nothing that wearies me so much as a long journey in the train. When I was twenty I started with the intention of long travel, but the train journey from Calais to Paris wearied me so much that I had rested in Paris for eight years, to return home then on account of some financial embarrassments. During those eight years I thought often of Italy and the south of France, but the train journey of sixteen or seventeen or eighteen hours to the Italian frontier always seemed so much like what purgatory must be, that the heaven of Italy on the other side never tempted me sufficiently to undertake it. A companion would be of no use; one cannot talk for fifteen or sixteen hours, and while debating with myself whether I should go to Plessy, I often glanced down the long perspective of hours. Everything, pleasure and pain alike, are greater in imagination than in reality--there is always a reaction, and having anticipated more than mortal weariness, I was surprised to find that the first two hours in the train passed very pleasantly. It seemed that I had only been in the train quite a little while when it stopped, yet Laroche is more than an hour from Paris, quite a countryside station, and it seems strange that the _Côte d'Azur_ should stop there. That was the grand name of the train that I was travelling by. Think of any English company running a train and calling it "The Azure Shore"! Think of going to Euston or to Charing Cross, saying you are going by "The Azure Shore"! So long as the name of this train endures, it is impossible to doubt that the French mind is more picturesque than the English, and one no longer wonders why the French school of painting, etc. A fruit seller was crying his wares along the platform, and just before we started from Laroche breakfast was preparing on board the train; I thought a basket of French grapes--the grapes that grow in the open air, not the leathery hot-house grapes filled with lumps of glue that we eat in England--would pass the time. I got out and bought a basket from him. On journeys like these one has to resort to many various little expedients. Alas! The grapes were decaying; only the bunch on the top was eatable; nor was that one worth eating, and I began to think that the railway company's attention should be directed to the fraud, for in my case a deliberate fraud had been effected. The directors of the railway would probably think that passengers should exercise some discrimination; it were surely easy for the passenger to examine the quality of a basket of grapes before purchasing--that would be the company's answer to my letter. The question of a letter to the newspaper did not arise, for French papers are not like ours--they do not print all the letters that are sent to them. The French public has no means of ventilating its grievances; a misfortune no doubt, but not such a misfortune as it seems, when one reflects on how little good a letter addressed to the public press does in the way of remedying abuses. I don't think we stopped again till we got to Lyons, and all the way there I sat at the window looking at the landscape--the long, long plain that the French peasant cultivates unceasingly. Out of that long plain came all the money that was lost in Panama, and all the money invested in Russian bonds--fine milliards came out of the French peasants' stockings. We passed through La Beauce. I believe it was there that Zola went to study the French peasant before he wrote "La Terre." Huysmans, with that benevolent malice so characteristic of him, used to say that Zola's investigation was limited to going out once for a drive in a carriage with Madame Zola. The primitive man that had risen out of some jungle of my being did not view this immense and highly cultivated plain sympathetically. It seemed to him to differ little from the town, so utterly was nature dominated by man and portioned out. On a subject like this one can meditate for a long time, and I meditated till my meditation was broken by the stopping of the train. We were at Lyons. The tall white-painted houses reminded me of Paris--Lyons, as seen from the windows of _La Côte d'Azur_ at the end of a grey December day might be Paris. The climate seemed the same; the sky was as sloppy and as grey. At last the train stopped at a place from which I could look down a side street, and I decided that Lyons wore a more provincial look than Paris, and I thought of the great silk trade and the dull minds of the merchants ... their dinner parties, etc. I noticed everything there was to notice in order to pass the time; but there was so little of interest that I wrote out a telegram and ran with it to the office, for Doris did not know what train I was coming by, and it is pleasant to be met at a station, to meet one familiar face, not to find oneself amid a crowd of strangers. Very nearly did I miss the train; my foot was on the footboard when the guard blew his whistle. "Just fancy if I had missed the train," I said, and settling myself in my seat I added, "now, let us study the landscape; such an opportunity as this may never occur again." The long plain cultivated with tedious regularity that we had been passing through before we came to Lyons, flowed on field after field; it seemed as if we should never reach the end of it, and looking on those same fields, for they were the same, I said to myself: "If I were an economist that plain would interest me, but since I got Doris's letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the waving field, and 'the spirit in his feet' leads him to some grassy glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse. What a soulless race that plain must breed," I thought; "what soulless days are lived there; peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to eat, procreate and sleep." At last a river appeared flowing amid sparse and stunted trees and reeds, a great wide sluggish river with low banks, flowing so slowly that it hardly seemed to flow at all. Rooks flew past, but they are hardly wilding birds; a crow--yes, we saw one; and I thought of a heron rising slowly out of one of the reedy islands; maybe an otter or two survives the persecution of the peasant, and I liked to think of a poacher picking up a rabbit here and there; hares must have almost disappeared, even the flock and the shepherd. France is not as picturesque a country as England; only Normandy seems to have pasturage, there alone the shepherd survives along the banks of the Seine. Picardy, though a swamp, never conveys an idea of the wild; and the middle of France, which I looked at then for the first time, shocked me, for primitive man, as I have said, was uppermost in me, and I turned away from the long plain, "Dreary," I said, "uneventful as a boarding-house." But it is a long plain that has no hill in it, and when I looked out again a whole range showed so picturesquely that I could not refrain, but turned to a travelling companion to ask its name. It was the Esterelles; and never shall I forget the picturesqueness of one moment--the jagged end of the Esterelles projecting over the valley, showing against what remained of the sunset, one or two bars of dusky red, disappearing rapidly amid heavy clouds massing themselves as if for a storm, and soon after night closed over the landscape. "Henceforth," I said, "I shall have to look to my own thoughts for amusement," and in my circumstances there was nothing reasonable for me to think of but Doris. Some time before midnight I should catch sight of her on the platform. It seemed to me wonderful that it should be so, and I must have been dreaming, for the voice of the guard, crying out that dinner was served awoke me with a start. It is said to be the habit of my countrymen never to get into conversation with strangers in the train, but I doubt if that be so. Everything depends on the tact of him who first breaks silence; if his manner inspires confidence in his fellow-traveller he will receive such answers as will carry the conversation on for a minute or two, and in that time both will have come to a conclusion whether the conversation should be continued or dropped. A pleasant little book might be written about train acquaintances. If I were writing such a book I would tell of the Americans I once met at Nuremberg, and with whom I travelled to Paris; it was such a pleasant journey. I should have liked to keep up their acquaintance, but it is not the etiquette of the road to do so. But I am writing no such book; I am writing the quest of a golden fleece, and may allow myself no further deflection in the narrative; I may tell, however, of the two very interesting people I met at dinner on board _La Côte d'Azur_, though some readers will doubt if it be any integral part of my story. The woman was a typical French woman, pleasant and agreeable, a woman of the upper middle classes, so she seemed to me, but as I knew all her ideas the moment I looked at her, conversation with her did not flourish; or would it be more true to say that her husband interested me more, being less familiar? His accent told me he was French; but when he took off his hat I could see that he had come from the tropics--Algeria I thought; not unlikely a soldier. His talk was less stilted than a soldier's, and I began to notice that he did not look like a Frenchman, and when he told me that he lived in an oasis in the desert, and was on his way home, his Oriental appearance I explained by his long residence among the Arabs. He had lived in the desert since he was fourteen. "Almost a Saharian," I said to him. And during dinner, and long after dinner we sat talking of the difference between the Oriental races and the European; of the various Arab _patois_. He spoke the Tunisean _patois_ and wrote the language of the Koran, which is understood all over the Sahara and the Soudan, as well as in Mecca. What interested me, perhaps even more than the language question, was the wilding's enterprise in attempting to cultivate the desert. He had already enlarged his estate by the discovery of two ancient Roman wells, and he had no doubt that all that part of the desert lying between the three oases could be brought into cultivation. In ancient times there were not three oases but one; the wells had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of acres had been laid waste by the Numidians in order, I think he told me, to save themselves from the Saracens who were following them. He spent eight months of every year in his oasis, and begged of me, as soon as I had wearied of Cannes, to take the boat from Marseilles--I suppose it was from Marseilles--and spend some time with him in the wild. "Visitors," he said, "are rare. You'll be very welcome. The railway will take you within a hundred miles; the last hundred miles will be accomplished on the back of a dromedary; I shall send you a fleet one and an escort." "Splendid," I answered. "I see myself arriving sitting high up on the hump gathering dates--I suppose there are date palms where you are? Yes?--and wearing a turban and a bournous." "Would you like to see my bournous?" he said, and opening his valise he showed me a splendid one which filled me with admiration, and only shame forbade me to ask him to allow me to try it on. Ideas haunt one. When I was a little child I insisted on wearing a turban and going out for a ride on the pony, flourishing a Damascus blade which my father had brought home from the East. Nothing else would have satisfied me; my father led the pony, and I have always thought this fantasy exceedingly characteristic; it must be so, for it awoke in me twenty years afterwards; and fanciful and absurd as it may appear, I certainly should have liked to have worn my travelling companion's bournous in the train if only for a few minutes. All this is twelve years ago, and I have not yet gone to visit him in his oasis, but how many times have I done so in my imagination, seeing myself arriving on the back of a dromedary crying out, "Allah! Allah! And Mohammed is his prophet!" But though one can go on thinking year after year about a bournous, one cannot talk for more than two or three hours about one; and though I looked forward to spending at least a fortnight with my friends, and making excursions in the desert, finding summer, as Fromentin says, _chez lui_, I was glad to say good-bye to my friends at Marseilles. I was still quite far from the end of my journey, and so weary of talk that at first I was doubtful whether or not it would be worth while to engage again in conversation, but a pleasant gentleman had got into my carriage, and he required little encouragement to tell me his story. His beginnings were very humble, but he was now a rich merchant. It is always interesting to hear how the office boy gets his first chance; the first steps are the interesting ones, and I should be able to tell his story here if we had not been interrupted in the middle of it by his little girl. She had wearied of her mother, who was in the next carriage, and had come in to sit on her father's knee. Her hair hung about her shoulders just as Doris's had done five years ago, taking the date from the day that I journeyed in quest of the golden fleece. She was a winsome child, with a little fluttering smile about her lips and a curious intelligence in her eyes. She admitted that she was tired, but had not been ill, and her father told me that long train journeys produced the same effect on her as a sea journey. She spoke with a pretty abruptness, and went away suddenly, I thought for good, but she returned half an hour afterwards looking a little faint, I thought, green about the mouth, and smiling less frequently. One cannot remember everything, and I have forgotten at what station these people got out; they bade me a kindly farewell, telling me that in about two hours and a half I should be at Plessy, and that I should have to change at the next station, and this lag end of my journey dragged itself out very wearily. Plessy is difficult to get at; one has to change, and while waiting for the train I seemed to lose heart; nothing seemed to matter, not even Doris. But these are momentary capitulations of the intellect and the senses, and when I saw her pretty face on the platform I congratulated myself again on my wisdom in having sent her the telegram. How much pleasanter it was to walk with her to the hotel than to walk there alone! "She is," I said to myself, "still the same pretty girl whom I so bitterly reproached for selfishness in Cumberland Place five years ago." To compliment her on her looks, to tell her that she did not look a day older, a little thinner, a little paler, that was all, but the same enchanting Doris, was the facile inspiration of the returned lover. And we walked down the platform talking, my talk full of gentle reproof--why had she waited up? There was a reason.... My hopes, till now buoyant as corks, began to sink. "She is going to tell me that I cannot come to her hotel. Why did I send that telegram from Lyons?" Had it not been for that telegram I could have gone straight to her hotel. It was just the telegram that had brought her to the station, and she had come to tell me that it was impossible for me to stay at her hotel. After thirty hours of travel it mattered little which hotel I stayed at, but to-morrow and the next day, the long week we were to spend together passed before my eyes, the tedium of the afternoons, the irritation and emptiness of Platonic evenings--"Heavens! what have I let myself in for," I thought, and my mind went back over the long journey and the prospect of returning _bredouille_, as the sportsmen say. But to argue about details with a woman, to get angry, is a thing that no one versed in the arts of love ever does. We are in the hands of women always; it is they who decide, and our best plan is to accept the different hotel without betraying disappointment, or as little as possible. But we had not seen each other for so long that we could not part at once. Doris said that I must come to her hotel and eat some supper. No; I had dined on board the train, and all she could persuade me to have was a cup of chocolate. Over that cup of chocolate we talked for an hour, and then I had to bid her good-night. The moon looked down the street coldly; I crossed from shadow to light, feeling very weary in all my body, and there was a little melancholy in my heart, for after all I might not win Doris. There was sleep, however, and sleep is at times a good thing, and that night it must have come quickly, so great was the refreshment I experienced in the morning when my eyes opened and, looking through mosquito curtains (themselves symbols of the South), were delighted by the play of the sunlight flickering along the flower-papered wall. The impulse in me was to jump out of bed at once and to throw open _les croisées_. And what did I see? Tall palm trees in the garden, and above them a dim, alluring sky, and beyond them a blue sea in almost the same tone as the sky. And what did I feel? Soft perfumed airs moving everywhere. And what was the image that rose up in my mind? The sensuous gratification of a vision of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood, the intoxication of the odour of her breasts.... Why should I think of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood? Because the morning seemed the very one that Venus should choose to rise from the sea. Forgive my sensuousness, dear reader; remember it was the first time I breathed the soft Southern air, the first time I saw orange trees; remember I am a poet, a modern Jason in search of a golden fleece. "Is this the garden of the Hesperides?" I asked myself, for nothing seemed more unreal than the golden fruit hanging like balls of yellow worsted among dark and sleek leaves; it reminded me of the fruit I used to see when I was a child under glass shades in lodging-houses, but I knew, nevertheless, that I was looking upon orange trees, and that the golden fruit growing amid the green leaves was the fruit I used to pick from the barrows when I was a boy; the fruit of which I ate so much in boyhood that I cannot eat it any longer; the fruit whose smell we associate with the pit of a theatre; the fruit that women never grow weary of, high and low. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that at last I should see oranges growing on trees; I so happy, so singularly happy, that I am nearly sure that happiness is, after all, no more than a faculty for being surprised. Since I was a boy I never felt so surprised as I did that morning. The _valet de chambre_ brought in my bath, and while I bathed and dressed I reflected on the luck of him who in middle age can be astonished by a blue sky, and still find the sunlight a bewitchment. But who would not be bewitched by the pretty sunlight that finds its way into the gardens of Plessy? I knew I was going to walk with Doris by a sea blue as any drop-curtain, and for a moment Doris seemed to be but a figure on a drop-curtain. Am I very cynical? But are we not all figures on drop-curtains, and is not everything comic opera, and "La Belle Hélène" perhaps the only true reality? Amused by the idea of Jason or Paris or Menelaus in Plessy, I asked Doris what music was played by the local orchestra, and she told me it played "The March of Aïda" every evening. "Oh, the cornet," I said, and I understood that the mission of Plessy was to redeem one from the coil of one's daily existence, from Hebrew literature and its concomitants, bishops, vicars, and curates--all these, especially bishops, are regarded as being serious; whereas French novels and their concomitants, pretty girls, are supposed to represent the trivial side of life. A girl becomes serious only when she is engaged to be married; the hiring of the house in which the family is reared is regarded as serious; in fact all prejudices are serious; every deflection from the normal, from the herd, is looked upon as trivial; and I suppose that this is right: the world could not do without the herd nor could the herd do without us--the eccentrics who go to Plessy in quest of a golden fleece instead of putting stoves in the parish churches (stoves and organs are always regarded as too devilishly serious for words). Once I had a long conversation with my archbishop concerning the Book of Daniel, and were I to write out his lordship's erudition I might even be deemed sufficiently serious for a review in the _Church Gazette_. But looking back on this interview and judging it with all the impartiality of which my nature is capable, I cannot in truth say that I regard it as more serious than pretty Doris's fluent conversation, or the melancholy aspect of his lordship's cathedral as more serious than the pretty Southern sunlight glancing along the seashore, lighting up the painted houses, and causing Doris to open her parasol. What a splendid article I might write on the trivial side of seriousness, but discussion is always trivial; I shall be much more serious in trying to recall the graceful movement of the opening of her parasol, and how prettily it enframed her face. True that almost every face is pretty against the distended silk full of sunlight and shadow, but Doris's, I swear to you, was as pretty as any medieval virgin despite its modernness. Memline himself never designed a more appealing little face. Think of the enchantment of such a face after a long journey, by the sea that the Romans and the Greeks used to cross in galleys, that I used to read about when I was a boy. There it was, and on the other side the shore on which Carthage used to stand; there it was, a blue bay with long red hills reaching out, reminding me of hills I had seen somewhere, I think in a battle piece by Salvator Rosa. It seemed to me that I had seen those hills before--no, not in a picture; had I dreamed them, or was there some remembrance of a previous existence struggling in my brain? There was a memory somewhere, a broken memory, and I sought for the lost thread as well as I could, for Doris rarely ceased talking. "And there is the restaurant," she said, flinging up her parasol, "built at the end of those rocks." We were the first swallows to arrive; the flocks would not be here for about three weeks. So we had the restaurant to ourselves, the waiter and doubtless the cook; and they gave us all their attention. Would we have breakfast in the glass pavilion? How shall I otherwise describe it, for it seemed to be all glass? The scent of the sea came through the window, and the air was like a cordial--it intoxicated; and looking across the bay one seemed to be looking on the very thing that Whistler had sought for in his Nocturnes, and that Steer had nearly caught in that picture of children paddling, that dim, optimistic blue that allures and puts the world behind one, the dream of the opium-eater, the phrase of the syrens in "Tannhäuser," the phrase which begins like a barcarolle; but the accompaniment tears underneath until we thrill with expectation. As I looked across the bay, Doris seemed but a little thing, almost insignificant, and the thought came that I had not come for nothing even if I did not succeed in winning her. "Doris, dear, forgive me if I am looking at this bay instead of you, but I've never seen anything like this before," and feeling I was doing very poor justice to the emotions I was experiencing, I said: "Is it not strange that all this is at once to me new and old? I seem, as it were, to have come into my inheritance." "Your inheritance! Am I not----" "Dearest, you are. Say that you are my inheritance, my beautiful inheritance; how many years have I waited for it?" As I took her in my arms she caught sight of the waiter, and turning from her I looked across the bay, and my desire nearly died in the infinite sweetness blowing across the bay. "Azure hills, not blue; hitherto I have only seen blue." "They're blue to-day because there is a slight mist, but they are in reality red." "A red-hilled bay," I said, "and all the slopes flecked with the white sides of villas." "Peeping through olive trees." "Olive trees, of course. I have never yet seen the olive; the olive begins at Avignon or thereabouts, doesn't it? It was dark night when we passed through Avignon." "You'll see very few trees here; only olives and ilex." "The ilex I know, and there is no more beautiful tree than the ilex." "Were not the crocuses that grew Under that ilex tree, As beautiful in scent and hue As ever fed the bee?" "Whose verses are those?" "Shelley's. I know no others. Are the lines very wonderful? They seem no more than a statement, yet they hang about my memory. I am glad I shall see the ilex tree." "And the eucalyptus--plenty of eucalyptus trees." "That was the scent that followed us this morning as we came through the gardens." "Yes, as we passed from our hotel one hung over the garden wall, and the wind carried its scent after us." The arrival of the waiter with _hors d'oeuvres_ distracted our attention from the olive tree to its fruit, I rarely touch olives, but that morning I ate many. Should we have mutton cutlets or lamb? Doris said the Southern mutton was detestable. "Then we'll have lamb." An idea came into my head, and it was this, that I had been mistaken about Doris's beauty. Hers was not like any face that one may find in a panel by Memline. She was like something, but I could not lay my thoughts on what she was like. "A sail would spoil the beauty of the bay," I said when the waiter brought in the coffee, and left us--we hoped for the last time. Taking hands and going to the window we sat looking across the sailless bay. "How is it that no ships come here? Is the bay looked upon as a mere ornament and reserved exclusively for the appreciation of visitors? Those hills, too, look as if they had been designed in a like intent.... How much more beautiful the bay is without a sail--why I cannot tell, but----" "But what?" "A great galley rowed by fifty men would look well in this bay.... The bay is antiquity, and those hills; all the morning while talking to you a memory or a shadow of a memory has fretted in my mind like a fly on a pane. Now I know why I have been expecting a nymph to rise out of those waves during breakfast. For a thousand years men believed that nymphs came up on those rocks, and that satyrs and their progeny might be met in the woods and on the hillsides. Only a thin varnish has been passed over these beliefs. One has only to come here to look down into that blue sea-water to believe that nymphs swim about those rocks; and when we go for a drive among those hillsides we'll keep a sharp lookout for satyrs. Now I know why I like this country. It is heathen. Those mountains--how different from the shambling Irish hills from whence I have come! And you, Doris, you might have been dug up yesterday, though you are but two-and-twenty. You are a thing of yester age, not a bit like the little Memline head which I imagined you to be like when I was coming here in the train, nor like anything done by the Nuremberg painters. You are a Tanagra figure, and one of the finest. In you I read all the winsomeness of antiquity. But I must look at the bay now, for I may never see anything like it again; never have I seen anything like it before. Forgive me, remember that three days ago I was in Ireland, the day before yesterday I was in England, yesterday I was in Paris. I have come out of the greyness of the North. When I left Paris all was grey, and when the train passed through Lyons a grey night was gathering; now I see no cloud at all: the change is so wonderful. You cannot appreciate my admiration. You have been looking at the bay for the last three weeks, and _La côte d'azur_ has become nothing to you now but palms and promenades. To me it is still quite different. I shall always see you beautiful, whereas Plessy may lose her beauty in a few days. Let me enjoy it while I may." "Perhaps I shall not outlast Plessy." "Yes, you will. Do you know, Doris, that you don't look a day older since the first time I saw you walking across the room to the piano in your white dress, your gold hair hanging down over your shoulders. It has darkened a little, that is all." "It is provoking you should see me when I am thin. I wish you had seen me last year when I came from the rest cure. I went up more than a stone in weight. Every one said that I didn't look more than sixteen. I know I didn't, for all the women were jealous of me." As I sat watching the dissolving line of the horizon, lost in a dream, I heard my companion say: "Of what are you thinking?" "I'm thinking of something that happened long ago in that very bay." "Tell me about it;" and her hand sought mine for a moment. "Would you like to hear it? I'd like to tell it, but it's a long, long story, and to remember it would be an effort. The colour of the sea and the sky is enough; the warmth of the sunlight penetrates me; I feel like a plant; the only difference between me and one of those palm trees----" "I am sure those poor palms are shivering. There is not enough heat here for them; they come from the south, and you come from the north." "I suppose that is so. They grow, but they don't flourish here. However, my mood is not philanthropic; I cannot pity even a palm tree at the present moment. See how my cigar smoke curls and goes out! It is strange, Doris, that I should meet you here, for some years ago it was arranged that I should come here----" "With a woman?" "Yes, of course. How can it be otherwise? Our lives are woven along and across with women. Some men find the reality of their lives in women, others, as we were saying just now, in bishops." "Tell me about the woman who asked you to come here? Did you love her? And what prevented you from coming here with her?" "It is one of the oddest stories--odd only because it is like myself. Every character creates it own stories; we are like spools, and each spool fills itself up with a different-coloured thread. The story, such as it is, began one evening in Victoria Street at the end of a long day's work. A letter began it. She wrote asking me to dine with her, and her letter was most welcome, for I had no plans for that evening. I do not know if you know that curious dread of life which steals through the twilight; it had just laid its finger on my shoulder when the bell rang, and I said: 'My visitor is welcome, whoever she or he may be.' The visitor would have only spent a few minutes perhaps with me, but Gertrude's letter--that was her name--was a promise of a long and pleasant evening, for it was more than a mere invitation to dinner. She wrote: 'I have not asked any one to meet you, but you will not mind dining alone with me. I hope you will be able to come, for I want to consult you on a matter about which I think you will be able to advise me.' As I dressed I wondered what she could have to propose, and with my curiosity enkindled I walked to her house. The evening was fine--I remember it--and she did not live far from me; we were neighbours. You see I knew Gertrude pretty well, and I liked her. There had been some love passages between us, but I had never been her lover; our story had got entangled, and as I went to her I hoped that this vexatious knot was to be picked at last. To be Gertrude's lover would be a pleasure indeed, for though a woman of forty, a natural desire to please, a witty mind, and pretty manners still kept her young; she had all the appearance of youth; and French gowns and underwear that cost a little fortune made her a woman that one would still take a pleasure in making love to. It would be pleasant to be her lover for many reasons. There were disadvantages, however, for Gertrude, though never vulgar herself, liked vulgar things. Her friends were vulgar; her flat, for she had just left her husband, was opulent, overdecorated; the windows were too heavily curtained, the electric light seemed to be always turned on, and as for the pictures--well, we won't talk of them; Gertrude was the only one worth looking at. And she was rather like a Salon picture, a Gervex, a Boldeni--I will not be unjust to Gertrude, she was not as vulgar as a Boldeni. She had a pretty cooing manner, and her white dress fell gracefully from her slender flanks. You can see her, can't you, coming forward to meet me, rustling a little, breathing an odour of orris root, taking my hand and very nearly pressing it against her bosom? Gertrude knew how to suggest, and no sooner had the thought that she wished to inspire passed through my mind than she let go my hand, saying: 'Come, sit down by me, tell me what you have been doing'; and her charm was that it was impossible to say whether what I have described, dress, manner, and voice, was unconscious or intentional." "Probably a little of both," Doris said. "I see you understand. You always understand." "And to make amends for the familiarity of pressing your hand to her bosom she would say: 'I hope you will not mind dining alone with me,' and immediately you would propound a little theory that two is company and three is a county council, unless indeed the three consist of two men and one woman. A woman is never really happy unless she is talking to two men, woman being at heart a polyandrist." "Doris, you know me so well that you can invent my conversations." "Yes, I think I can. You have not changed; I have not forgotten you though we have not seen each other for five years; and now go on, tell me about Gertrude." "Well, sitting beside her on the sofa----" "Under the shaded electric light," interrupted Doris. "I tried to discover--not the reason of this invitation to dinner; of course it was natural that old friends should dine together, but she had said in her letter that she wished to talk to me about some matter on which she thought I could advise her. The servant would come in a moment to announce that dinner was ready, and if Gertrude did not tell me at once I might, if the story were a long one, have to wait till dinner was over; her reluctance to confide in me seemed to point to pecuniary help. Was it possible that Gertrude was going to ask me to lend her money! If so, the loan would be a heavy one, more than I could afford to lend. That is the advantage of knowing rich people; when they ask for money they ask for more than one can afford to lend, and one can say with truth: 'Were I to lend you five hundred pounds, I should not be able to make ends meet at the end of the year.' Her reluctance to confide in me seemed incomprehensible, unless indeed she wanted to borrow money. But Gertrude was not that kind, and she was a rich woman. At last, just before the servant came into the room, she turned round saying that she had sent for me because she wished to speak to me about a yacht. Imagine my surprise. To speak to me about a yacht! If it had been about the picture. "The door opened, the servant announced that dinner was ready, and we had to talk in French during dinner, for her news was that she had hired a yacht for the winter in order that she might visit Greece and the Greek Islands. But she did not dare to travel in Greece alone for six months, and it was difficult to find a man who was free and whom one could trust. She thought she could trust me, and remembering that I had once liked her, it had occurred to her to ask me if I would like to go with her. I shall never forget how Gertrude confided her plan to me, the charming modesty with which she murmured: 'Perhaps you do still, and you will not bore me by claiming rights over me. I don't mind your making love to me, but I don't like rights. You know what I mean. When we return to England you will not pursue me. You know what I have suffered from such pursuits; you know all about it?' Is it not curious how a woman will sometimes paint her portrait in a single phrase; not paint, but indicate in half-a-dozen lines her whole moral nature? Gertrude exists in the words I have quoted just as God made her. And now I have to tell you about the pursuit. When Gertrude mentioned it I had forgotten it; a blankness came into my face, and she said: 'Don't you remember?' 'Of course, of course,' I said, and this is the story within the story. "One day after lunch Gertrude, getting up, walked unconsciously towards me, and quite naturally I took her in my arms, and when I had told her how much I liked her, and the pleasure I took in her company, she promised to meet me at a hotel in Lincoln. We were to meet there in a fortnight's time; but two days before she sent for me, and told me that she would have to send me away. I really did like Gertrude, and I was quite overcome, and a long hour was spent begging of her to tell why she had come to this determination. One of course says unjust things, one accuses a woman of cruelty; what could be the meaning of it? Did she like to play with a man as a cat plays with a mouse? But Gertrude, though she seemed distressed at my accusations, refused to give me any explanation of her conduct; tears came into her eyes--they seemed like genuine tears--and it was difficult to believe that she had taken all this trouble merely to arrive at this inexplicable and most disagreeable end. Months passed without my hearing anything of Gertrude, till one day she sent me a little present, and in response to a letter she invited me to come to see her in the country. And, walking through some beautiful woods, she told me the reason why she had not gone to Lincoln. A Pole whom she had met at the gambling tables at Monte Carlo was pursuing her, threatening her that if he saw her with any other man he would murder her and her lover. This at first seemed an incredible tale, but when she entered into details, there could be no doubt that she was telling the truth, for had she not on one occasion very nearly lost her life through this man? They were in Germany together, she and the Pole, and he had locked her up in her room without food for many hours, and coming in suddenly he had pressed the muzzle of a pistol against her temple and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, it did not go off. 'It was a very near thing,' she said; 'the cartridge was indented, and I made up my mind that if things went any further, I should have to tell my husband.' 'But things can't go further than an indented cartridge,' I answered. 'What you tell me is terrible'; and we talked for a long time, walking about the woods, fearing that the Pole might spring from behind every bush, the pistol in his hand. But he did not appear; she evidently knew where he was, or had made some compact with him. Nevertheless, at the close of the day, I drove through the summer evening not having got anything from Gertrude except a promise that if she should find herself free, she would send for me. Weeks and months went by during which I saw Gertrude occasionally; you see love stories, once they get entangled, remain entangled; that is what makes me fear that we shall never be able to pick the knot that you have tied our love story into. Misadventure followed misadventure. It seems to me that I behaved very stupidly on many occasions; it would take too long to tell you how--when I met her at the theatre I did not do exactly what I should have done; and on another occasion when I met her driving in a suburb, I did not stop her cab, and so on and so on until, resolved to bring matters to a crisis, Gertrude had sent me an invitation to dinner, and her plan was the charming one which I have told you, that we should spend six months sailing about the Greek Islands in a yacht. We left the dining-room and returned to the drawing-room, she telling me that the yacht had been paid for--the schooner, the captain, the crew, everything for six months; but I not unnaturally pointed out to her that I could not accept her hospitality for so long a time, and the greater part of the evening was spent in trying to persuade her to allow me to pay--Gertrude was the richer--at least a third of the upkeep of the yacht must come out of my pocket. "The prospect of a six months' cruise among the Greek Islands kindled my imagination, and while listening to Gertrude I was often in spirit far away, landing perchance at Cyprus, exalted at the prospect of visiting the Cyprians' temple; or perchance standing with Gertrude on the deck of the yacht watching the stars growing dim in the east; the sailors would be singing at the time, and out of the ashen stillness a wind would come, and again we would hear the ripple of the water parting as the jib filled and drew the schooner eastward. I imagined how half an hour later an island would appear against the golden sky, a lofty island lined with white buildings, perchance ancient fanes. 'What a delicious book my six months with Gertrude will be!' I said as I walked home, and the title of the book was an inspiration, 'An Unsentimental Journey.' It was Gertrude's own words that had suggested it. Had she not said that she did not mind my making love to her, but she did not like rights? She couldn't complain if I wrote a book, and I imagined how every evening when the lover left her, the chronicler would sit for an hour recording his impressions. Very often he would continue writing until the pencil dropped from his hand, till he fell asleep in the chair. An immediate note-taking would be necessary, so fugitive are impressions, and an analysis of his feelings, their waxing and their waning; he would observe himself as an astronomer observes the course of a somewhat erratic star, and his descriptions of himself and of her would be interwoven with descriptions of the seas across which Menelaus had gone after Helen's beauty--beauty, the noblest of men's quests. "For once Nature seemed to me to put into the hands of the artist a subject perfect in its every part; the end especially delighted me, and I imagined our good-byes at Plymouth or Portsmouth or Hull, wherever we might land. 'Well, Gertrude, goodbye. We have spent a very pleasant six months together; I shall never forget our excursion. But this is not a rupture; I may hope to see you some time during the season? You will allow me to call about tea-time?' And she would answer: 'Yes, you may call. You have been very nice.' Each would turn away sighing, conscious of a little melancholy in the heart, for all partings are sad; but at the bottom of the heart there would be a sense of relief, of gladness--that gladness which the bird feels when it leaves its roost: there is nothing more delicious perhaps than the first beat of the wings. I forget now whether I looked forward most to the lady or to the book.... If the winds had been more propitious, I might have written a book that would have compared favourably with the eighteenth-century literature, for the eighteenth century was cynical in love; while making love to a woman, a gallant would often consider a plan for her subsequent humiliation. Gouncourt----" "But, dear one, finish about the yacht." "Well, it seemed quite decided that Gertrude and I were to go to Marseilles to meet the schooner; but the voyage from the Bay of Biscay is a stormy and a tedious one; the weather was rough all the way, and she took a long time to get to Gibraltar. She passed the strait signalling to Lloyd's; we got a telegram; everything was ready; I had ordered yachting clothes, shoes, and quantities of things; but after that telegram no news came, and one evening Gertrude told me she was beginning to feel anxious; the yacht ought to have arrived at Marseilles. Three or four days passed, and then we read in the paper--the _Evening Standard_, I think it was--the _Ring-Dove_, a large schooner, had sunk off the coast while making for the Bay of Plessy. Had she passed that point over yonder, no doubt she would have been saved; all hands were lost, the captain, seven men, and my book." "Good heavens, how extraordinary! And what became of Gertrude? Were you never her lover?" "Never. We abstained while waiting for the yacht. Then she fell in love with somebody else; she married her lover; and now he deplores her; she found an excellent husband, and she died in his arms." At every moment I expected Doris to ask me how it was that, for the sake of writing a book, I had consented to go away for a six months' cruise with a woman whom I didn't love. But there was a moment when I loved her--the week before Lincoln. Whether Doris agreed tacitly that my admiration of Gertrude's slender flanks and charm of manner and taste in dress justified me in agreeing to go away with her, I don't know; she did not trouble me with the embarrassing question I had anticipated. Isn't it strange that people never ask the embarrassing questions one foresees? She asked me instead with whom I had been in love during the past five years, and this too embarrassed me, though not to the extent the other question would have done. To say that since I had seen Doris I had led a chaste life would be at once incredible and ridiculous. Sighing a little, I spoke of a _liaison_ that had lasted many years and had come to an end at last. Fearing that Doris would ask if it had come to an end through weariness, it seemed well to add that the lady had a daughter growing up, and it was for the girl's sake we had agreed to bring our love story to a close. We had, however, promised to remain friends. Doris's silence embarrassed me a little, for she didn't ask any questions about the lady and her daughter; and it was impossible to tell from her manner whether she believed that this lady comprised the whole of my love life for the last five years, and if she thought I had really broken with her. For a moment or two I did not dare to look at Doris, and then I felt that her disbelief mattered little, so long as it did not enter as an influencing factor into the present situation. Under a sky as blue and amid nature poetical as a drop-curtain, one's moral nature dozes. No doubt that was it. There is an English church at Plessy, but really! Dear little town, town of my heart, where the local orchestra plays "The March of Aida" and "La Belle Hélène"! If I could inoculate you, reader, with the sentiment of the delicious pastoral you would understand why, all the time I was at Plessy, I looked upon myself as a hero of legend, whether of the Argonauts or the siege of Troy matters little. Returning from Mount Ida after a long absence, after presenting in imagination the fairest of women with the apple, I said: "You asked me whom I had been in love with; now tell me with whom have you been in love?" "For the last three years I have been engaged to be married." "And you are still engaged?" She nodded, her eyes fixed on the blue sea, and I said laughing, that it was not of a marriage or an engagement to be married that I spoke, but of the beautiful, irrepressible caprice. "You wouldn't have me believe that no passion has caught you and dragged you about for the last five years, just as a cat drags a little mouse about?" "It is strange that you should ask me that, for that is exactly what happened." "Really?" "Only that I suffered much more than any mouse ever suffered." "Doris, tell me. You know how sympathetic I am; you know I shall understand. All things human interest me. If you have loved as much as you say, your story will ... I must hear it." "Why should I tell it?" and her eyes filled with tears. "I suffered horribly. Don't speak to me about it. What is the good of going over it all again?" "Yes, there is good; very much good comes of speaking, if this love story is over, if there is no possibility of reviving it. Tell it, and in telling, the bitterness will pass from you. Who was this man? How did you meet him?" "He was a friend of Albert's. Albert introduced him." "Albert is the man you are engaged to? The old story, the very oldest. Why should it always be the friend? There are so many other men, but it is always the friend who attracts." And I told Doris the story of a friend who had once robbed me, and my story had the effect of drying her tears. But they began again as soon as she tried to tell her own story. There could be no doubt that she had suffered. Things are interesting in proportion to the amount of ourselves we put into them; Doris had clearly put all her life into this story; a sordid one it may seem to some, a story of deception and lies, for of course Albert was deceived as cruelly as many another good man. But Doris must have suffered deeply, for at the memory of her sufferings her face streamed with tears. As I looked at her tears I said: "It is strange that she should weep so, for her story differs nowise from the many stories happening daily in the lives of men and women. She will tell me the old and beautiful story of lovers forced asunder by cruel fate, and this spot is no doubt a choice one to hear her story." And raising my eyes I admired once again the drooping shore, the serrated line of mountains sweeping round the bay. And the colour was so intense that it overpowered the senses like a perfume, "like musk," I thought. When I turned to Doris I could see she was wholly immersed in her own sorrow, and it took all my art to persuade her to tell it, or it seemed as if all my art of persuasion were necessary. "As soon as you knew you loved him, you resolved to see him no more?" Doris nodded. "You sent him away before you yielded to him?" She nodded, and looking at me her eyes filled with tears, but which only seemed to make them still more beautiful, she told me that they had both felt that it was impossible to deceive Albert. * * * * * All love stories are alike in this; they all contain what the reviewers call "sordid details." But if Tristan had not taken advantage of King Mark's absence on a hunting expedition, the world would have been the poorer of a great love story; and what, after all, does King Mark's happiness matter to us--a poor passing thing, whose life was only useful in this, that it gave us an immortal love story? And if Wagner had not loved Madame Wasendonck, and if Madame Wasendonck had not been unfaithful to her husband, we should not have had "Tristan." Who then would, for the sake of Wasendonck's honour, destroy the score of "Tristan"? Nor is the story of "Tristan" the only one, nor the most famous. There is also the story of Helen. If Menelaus's wife had not been unfaithful to him, the world would have been the poorer of the greatest of all poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Dear me, when one thinks of it, one must admit that art owes a great deal to adultery. Children are born of the marriage, stories of the adulterous bed, and the world needs both--stories as well as children. Even my little tale would not exist if Doris had been a prudent maiden, nor would it have interested me to listen to her that day by the sea if she had naught to tell me but her unswerving love for Albert. Her story is not what the world calls a great story, and it would be absurd to pretend that if a shorthand writer had taken it down his report would compare with the stories of Isolde and Helen, but I heard it from her lips, and her tears and her beauty replaced the language of Wagner and of Homer; and so well did they do this that I am not sure that the emotion I experienced in listening to her was less than that which I have experienced before a work of art. "Do you know," she began, "perhaps you don't, perhaps you've never loved enough to know the anxiety one may feel for the absent. We had been together all day once, and when we bade each other good-bye we agreed that we should not see each other for two days, till Thursday; but that night in bed an extraordinary desire took hold of me to know what had become of him. I felt I must hear from him; one word would be enough. But we had promised. It was stupid, it was madness, yet I had to take down the telephone, and when I got into communication what do you think the answer was?--'Thank God you telephoned! I've been walking about the room nearly out of my mind, feeling that I should go mad if the miracle did not happen.'" "If you loved Ralph better than Albert----" "Why didn't I give up Albert? Albert's life would have been broken and ruined if I had done that. You see he has loved me so many years that his life has become centred in me. He is not one of those men who like many women. Outside of his work nothing exists but me. He doesn't care much for reading, but he reads the books I like. I don't know that he cares much about music for its own sake, but he likes to hear me sing just because it is me. He never notices other women; I don't think that he knows what they wear, but he likes my dresses, not because they are in good taste, but because I wear them. One can't sacrifice a man like that. What would one think of oneself? One would die of remorse. So there was nothing to be done but for Ralph to go away. It nearly killed me." "I'm afraid I can give you no such love; my affection for you will prove very tepid after such violent emotions." "I don't want such emotions again; I could not bear them, they would kill me; even a part would kill me. Two months after Ralph left I was but a little shadow. I was thinner than I am now, I was worn to a thread, I could hardly keep body and skirt together." We laughed at Doris's little joke; and we watched it curling and going out like a wreath of cigarette smoke. "But did you get no happiness at all out of this great love?" "We were happy only a very little while." "How long?" Doris reflected. "We had about six weeks of what I should call real happiness, the time while Albert was away. When he came back the misery and remorse began again. I had to see him--not Albert, the other--every day; and Albert began to notice that I was different. We used to go out together, we three, and at last the sham became too great and Albert said he could not stand it any longer. 'I prefer you should go out with him alone, and if it be for your happiness I'll give you up.'" "So you nearly died of love! Well, now you must live for love, liking things as they go by. Life is beautiful at the moment, sad when we look back, fearful when we look forward; but I suppose it's hopeless to expect a little Christian like you to live without drawing conclusions, liking things as they go by as the nymphs do. Dry those tears; forget that man. You tell me it is over and done. Remember nothing except that the sky and the sea are blue, that it is a luxury to feel alive here by the sea-shore. My happiness would be to make you happy, to see you put the past out of your mind, to close your eyes to the future. That will be easy to do by this beautiful sea-shore, under those blue skies with flowers everywhere and drives among the mountains awaiting us. We create our own worlds. Chance has left you here and sent me to you. I want you to eat a great deal and to sleep and to get fatter and to dream and to read Theocritus, so that when we go to the mountains we shall be transported into antiquity. You must forget Albert and him who made you unhappy--he allowed you to look back and forwards." "I think I deserve some happiness; you see I have sacrificed so much." At these words my hopes rose--shall I say like a balloon out of which a great weight of ballast has been thrown?--and so high did they go that failure seemed like a little feather swimming in the gulf below. "She deserved some happiness," and intends to make me her happiness. Her words could bear no other interpretation; she had spoken without thought, and instinctively. Albert was away; why should she not take this happiness which I offered her? Would she understand that distance made a difference, that it was one thing to deceive Albert if he were with her, and another when she was a thousand miles away? It was as if we were in a foreign country; we were under palm trees, we were by the Mediterranean. With Albert a thousand miles away it would be so easy for her to love me. She had said there was no question of her marrying any one but Albert--and to be unfaithful is not to be inconstant. These were the arguments which I would use if I found that I had misunderstood her; but for the moment I did not dare to inquire; it would be too painful to hear I had misunderstood her; but at last, feeling she might guess the cause of my silence, I said, not being able to think of anything more plausible: "You spoke, didn't you, of going for a drive?" "We were speaking of happiness--but if you'd like to go for a drive. There's no happiness like driving." "Isn't there?" She pinched my arm, and with a choking sensation in the throat I asked her if I should send for a carriage. "There will be time for a short drive before the sun setting. You said you admired the hills--one day we will go to a hill town. There is a beautiful one--Florac is the name of it--but we must start early in the morning. To-day there will be only time to drive as far as the point you have been admiring all the morning. The road winds through the rocks, and you want to see the ilex trees." "My dear, I want to see you." "Well, you're looking at me. Come, don't be disagreeable." "Disagreeable, Doris! I never felt more kindly in my life. I'm still absorbed in the strange piece of luck which has brought us together, and in such a well-chosen spot; no other would have pleased me as much." "Now why do you like the landscape? Tell me." "I cannot think of the landscape now, Doris: I'm thinking of you, of what you said just now." "What did I say?" "You said--I tried to remember the words at the time, but I have forgotten them, so many thoughts have passed through my mind since--you said--how did you word it?--after having suffered as much as you did, some share of happiness----" "No, I didn't say that; I said, having sacrificed so much, I thought I deserved a little happiness." "So she knew what she was saying," I said to myself. "Her words were not casual," but not daring to ask her if she intended to make me her happiness, I spoke about the landscape. "You ask me why I like the landscape? Because it carries me back into past times when men believed in nymphs and in satyrs. I have always thought it must be a wonderful thing to believe in the dryad. Do you know that men wandering in the woods sometimes used to catch sight of a white breast between the leaves, and henceforth they could love no mortal woman? The beautiful name of their malady was nympholepsy. A disease that every one would like to catch." "But if you were to catch it you wouldn't be able to love me, so I'll not bring you to the mountains. Some peasant girl----" "Fie! Doris, I have never liked peasant girls." "Your antiquity is eighteenth-century antiquity. There are many alcoves in it." "I don't know that the alcove was an invention of the eighteenth century. There were alcoves at all times. But, Doris, good heavens! what are those trees? Never did I see anything so ghastly; they are like ghosts. Not only have they no leaves, but they have no bark nor any twigs; nothing but great white trunks and branches." "I think they are called plantains." "That won't do, you are only guessing; I must ask the coachman." "I think, sir, they are called plantains." "You only think. Stop and I'll ask those people." "Sont des plantains, Monsieur." "Well, I told you so," Doris said, laughing. Beyond this spectral avenue, on either side of us there were fields, and Doris murmured: "See how flat the country is, to the very feet of the hills, and the folk working in the fields are pleasant to watch." I declared that I could not watch them, nor could you, reader, if you had been sitting by Doris. I had risen and come away from long months of toil; and I remember how I told Doris as we drove across those fields towards the hills, that it was not her beauty alone that interested me; her beauty would not be itself were it not illumed by her wit and her love of art. What would she be, for instance, if she were not a musician? Or would her face be the same face if it were robbed of its mirth? But mirth is enchanting only when the source of it is the intelligence. Vacuous laughter is the most tiresome of things; a face of stone is more inveigling. But Doris prided herself on her beauty more than on her wit, and she was disinclined to admit the contention that beauty is dependent upon the intelligence. Our talk rambled on, now in one direction, now in another. Lovers are divided into two kinds, the babbling and the silent. We meet specimens of the silent kind on a Thames back-water--the punt drawn up under the shady bank with the twain lying side by side, their arms about each other all the afternoon. When evening comes, and it is time to return home, her fellow gets out the sculls, and they part saying: "Well, dear, next Sunday, at the same time." "Yes, at the same time next Sunday." We were of the babbling kind, as the small part of our conversation that appears in this story shows. "My dear, my dear, remember that we are in an open carriage." "What do those folks matter to us?" "My dear, if I don't like it?" To justify my desire of her lips I began to compare her beauty with that of a Greek head on a vase, saying that hers was a cameo-like beauty, as dainty as any Tanagra figure. "And to see you and not to claim you, not to hold your face in my hands just as one holds a vase, is----" "Is what?" "A kind of misery. What else shall I say? Fancy my disappointment if, on digging among these mountains, I were to find a beautiful vase, and some one were to say: 'You can look at it but not touch it.'" "Do you love me as well as that?" she answered, somewhat moved, for my words expressed a genuine emotion. "I do indeed, Doris." "We might get out here. I want you to see the view from the hilltop." And, telling the driver that he need not follow us, to stay there and rest his panting horse, we walked on. Whether Doris was thinking of the view I know not; I only know that I thought only of kissing Doris. To do so would be pleasant--in a way--even on this cold hillside, and I noticed that the road bent round the shoulder of the mount. We soon reached the hilltop, and we could see the road enter the village in the dip between the hills, a double line of houses--not much more--facing the sea, a village where we might go to have breakfast; we might never go there; however that might be, we certainly should remember that village and the road streaming out of it on the other side towards the hills. Now and then we lost sight of the road; it doubled round some rock or was hidden behind a group of trees; and then we caught sight of it a little farther on, ascending the hills in front of us, and no doubt on the other side it entered another village, and so on around the coast of Italy. Even with the thought of Doris's kisses in my mind, I could admire the road and the curves of the bay. I felt in my pocket for a piece of paper and a pencil. The colour was as beautiful as a Brabizon; there were many tints of blue, no doubt, but the twilight had gathered the sea and sky into one tone, or what seemed to be one tone. "You wanted to see olive trees--those are olives." "So those are olives! Do I at last look upon olives?" "Are you disappointed?" "Yes and no. The white gnarled trunk makes even the young trees seem old. The olive is like an old man with skimpy legs. It seems to me a pathetic tree. One does not like to say it is ugly; it is not ugly, but it would be puzzling to say wherein lies its charm, for it throws no shade, and is so grey--nothing is so grey as the olive. I like the ilex better." Where the road dipped there was a group of ilex trees, and it was in their shade that I kissed Doris, and the beauty of the trees helps me to appreciate the sentiment of those kisses. And I remember that road and those ilex trees as I might remember a passage in Theocritus. Doris--her very name suggests antiquity, and it was well that she was kissed by me for the first time under ilex trees; true that I had kissed her before, but that earlier love story has not found a chronicler, and probably it never will. I like to think that the beauty of the ilex is answerable, perhaps, for Doris's kisses--in a measure. Her dainty grace, her Tanagra beauty, seemed to harmonise with that of the ilex, for there is an antique beauty in this tree that we find in none other. Theocritus must have composed many a poem beneath it. It is the only tree that the ancient world could have cared to notice; and if it were possible to carve statues of trees, I am sure that the ilex is the tree sculptors would choose. The beech and the birch, all the other trees, only began to be beautiful when men invented painting. No other tree shapes itself out so beautifully as the ilex, lifting itself up to the sky so abundantly and with such dignity--a very queen in a velvet gown is the ilex tree; and we stood looking at the group, admiring its glossy thickness, till suddenly the ilex tree went out of my mind, and I thought of the lonely night that awaited me. "Doris, dear, it is more than flesh and blood can bear. My folly lay in sending the telegram. Had I not sent it you wouldn't have known by what train I was coming; you would have been fast asleep in your bed, and I should have gone straight to your hotel." "But, darling, you wouldn't compromise me. Every one would know that we stayed at the same hotel." "Dearest, it might happen by accident, and were it to happen by accident what could you do?" "All I can say is that it would be a most unfortunate accident." "Then I have come a thousand miles for nothing. This is worse than the time in London when I left you for your strictness. Can nothing be done?" "Am I not devoted to you? We have spent the whole day together. Now I don't think it's at all nice of you to reproach me with having brought you on a fool's errand." "I didn't say that," and we quarrelled a little until we reached the carriage. Doris was angry, and when she spoke again it was to say: "If you are not satisfied, you can go back. I'm sorry. I think it's most unreasonable that you should ask me to compromise myself." "And I think it's unkind of you to suggest that I should go back, for how can I go back?" She did not ask me why--she was too angry at the moment--and it was well she did not, for I should have been embarrassed to tell her that I was fairly caught. I had come a thousand miles to see her, and I could not say I was going to take the _Côte d'azur_ back again, because she would not let me stay at her hotel; to do so would be too childish, too futile. The misery of the journey back would be unendurable. There was nothing to do but to wait, and hope that life, which is always full of accidents, would favour us. Better think no more about it. For it is thinking that makes one miserable. There were many little things which helped to pass the time away. Doris went every evening to a certain shop to fetch two eggs that had been laid that morning. It was necessary for her health that she should eat eggs beaten up with milk between the first and second breakfast. We went there, and it was amusing to pick my way through the streets, carrying her eggs back to the hotel for her. She knew a few people--strange folk, I thought them--elderly spinsters living _en pension_ at different hotels. We dined with her friends, and after dinner Doris sang, and when she had played many things that she used to play to me in the old days, it was time for her to go to bed, for she rarely slept after six o'clock, so she said. "Good-night. Ah, no, the hour is ill," I murmured to myself as I wended my lonely way, and I lay awake thinking if I had said anything that would prejudice my chances of winning her, if I had omitted to say anything that might have inclined her to yield. One lies awake at night thinking of the mistakes one has made; thoughts clatter in one's head. Good heavens! how stupid it was of me not to have used a certain argument. Perhaps if I had spoken more tenderly, displayed a more Christian spirit--all that paganism, that talk about nymphs and dryads and satyrs and fauns frightened her. In the heat of the moment one says more than one intends, though it is quite true that, as a rule, it is well to insist that there is no such thing as our lower nature, that everything about us is divine. So constituted are we that the mind accepts the convention, and what we have to do is to keep to the convention, just as in opera. Singing appears natural so long as the characters do not speak. Once they speak they cannot go back to music; the convention has been broken. As in Art so it is in Life. Tell a woman that she is a nymph, and she must not expect any more from you than she would from a faun, that all you know is the joy of the sunlight, that you have no dreams beyond the worship of the perfect circle of her breast, and the desire to gather grapes for her, and she will give herself to you unconscious of sin. I must have fallen asleep thinking of these things, and I must have slept soundly, for I remembered nothing until the servant came in with my bath, and I saw again the pretty sunlight flickering along the wall-paper. Before parting the previous night, Doris and I had arranged that I was to call an hour earlier than usual at the hotel; I was to be there at half-past ten. She had promised to be ready. We were going to drive to Florac, to one of the hill towns, and it would take two hours to get there. We were going to breakfast there, and while I dressed, and in the carriage going there, I cherished the hope that perhaps I might be able to persuade Doris to breakfast in a private room, though feeling all the while that it would be difficult to do so, for the public room would be empty, and crowds of waiters would gather about us like rooks, each trying to entice us towards his table. The village of Florac is high up among the hills, built along certain ledges of rock overlooking the valley, and going south in the train one catches sight of many towns, like it built among mountain declivities, hanging out like nests over the edge of precipices, showing against a red background, crowning the rocky hill. No doubt these mediaeval towns were built in these strange places because of the security that summit gives against raiders. One can think of no other reason, for it is hard to believe that in the fifteenth century men were so captivated with the picturesque that for the sake of it they would drag every necessary of life up these hills, several hundred feet above the plain, probably by difficult paths--the excellent road that wound along the edge of the hills, now to the right, now to the left, looping itself round every sudden ascent like a grey ribbon round a hat, did not exist when Florac was built. On the left the ground shelves away into the valley, down towards the sea, and olives were growing down all these hillsides. Above us were olive trees, with here and there an orange orchard, and the golden fruit shining among the dark leaves continued to interest me. Every now and again some sudden aspect interrupted our conversation; the bay as it swept round the carved mountains, looking in the distance more than ever like an old Italian picture of a time before painters began to think about values and truth of effect, when the minds of men were concerned with beauty; as mine was, for every time I looked at Doris it occurred to me that I had never seen anything prettier, and not only her face but her talk still continued to enchant me. She was always so eager to tell me things, that she must interrupt, and these interruptions were pleasant. I identified them with her, and so closely that I can remember how our talk began when we got out of the suburbs. By the last villa there was a eucalyptus tree growing; the sun was shining, and Doris had asked me to hold her parasol for her; but the road zigzagged so constantly that I never shifted the parasol in time, and a ray would catch her just in the face, adding perhaps to the freckles--there were just a few down that little nose which was always pleasant to look upon. I was saying that I still remember our talk as we passed that eucalyptus tree. Doris had begun one of those little confessions which are so interesting, and which one hears only from a woman one is making love to, which probably would not interest us were we to hear them from any one else. It delighted me to hear Doris say: "This is the first time I have ever lived alone, that I have ever been free from questions. It was a pleasure to remember suddenly as I was dressing that no one would ask me where I was going, that I was just like a bird by myself, free to spring off the branch and to fly. At home there are always people round one; somebody is in the dining-room, somebody is in the drawing-room; and if one goes down the passage with one's hat on there is always somebody to ask where one is going, and if you say you don't know they say, 'Are you going to the right or to the left, because if you are going to the left I should like you to stop at the apothecary's and to ask----?'" How I agreed with her! Family life I said degrades the individual, and is only less harmful than socialism, because one can escape from it.... "But, Doris, you're not ill! You are looking better." "I weighed this morning, and I have gone up two pounds. You see I am amused, and a woman's health is mainly a question whether she is amused, whether somebody is making love to her." "Making love! Doris, dear, there is no chance of making love to anybody here. That is the only fault I find with the place; the sea, the bay, the hill towns, everything I see is perfect in every detail, only the essential is lacking. I was thinking, Doris, that for the sake of your health we might go and spend a few days at Florac." "My dear, it would be impossible. Everybody would know that I had been there." "Maybe, but I don't agree. However, I am glad that you have gone up two pounds.... I am sure that what you need is mountain air. The seaside is no good at all for nerves. I have a friend in Paris who suffers from nerves and has to go every year to Switzerland to climb the Matterhorn." "The Matterhorn!" "Well, the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc; he has to climb mountains, glaciers, something of that kind. I remember last year I wrote to him saying that I did not understand the three past tenses in French, and would he explain why--something, I have forgotten what--and he answered: 'Avec mes pieds sur des glaciers je ne puis m'arrêter pour vous expliquer les trois passés.'" Doris laughed and was interested, for I had introduced her some years ago to the man who had written this letter; and then we discussed the _fussent_ and the _eussent, été_, and when our language of the French Grammar was exhausted we returned to the point whence we had come, whether it was possible to persuade Doris to pass three days in the hotel at Florac--in the interests of her health, of course. "I'm not sure at all that mountain air would not do me good. Plessy lies very low and is very relaxing." "Very." But though I convinced her that it would have been better if she had gone at once to stop at Florac, I could do nothing to persuade her to pass three days with me in the inn there. As we drove up through the town the only hope that remained in my mind was that I might induce her to take breakfast in a private room. But the _salle du restaurant_ was fifty feet long by thirty feet wide, it contained a hundred tables, maybe more, the floor was polished oak, and the ceilings were painted and gilded, and there were fifty waiters waiting for the swallows that would soon arrive from the north; we were the van birds. "Shall we breakfast in a private room?" I whispered humbly. "Good heavens! no! I wouldn't dare to go into a private room before all these waiters." My heart sank again, and when Doris said, "Where shall we sit?" I answered, "Anywhere, anywhere, it doesn't matter." It had taken two hours for the horses to crawl up to the mountain town, and as I had no early breakfast I was ravenously hungry. A box of sardines and a plate of butter, and the prospect of an omelette and a steak, put all thoughts of Doris for the moment out of my head, and that was a good thing. We babbled on, and it was impossible to say which was the more interested, which enjoyed talking most; and the pleasure which each took in talking and hearing the other talk became noticeable. "I didn't interrupt you just now, I thought it would be cruel, for you were enjoying yourself so much," said Doris, laughing. "Well, I promise not to interrupt the next time--you were in the midst of one of your stories." It was not long before she was telling me another story, for Doris was full of stories. She observed life as it went by, and could recall what she had seen. Our talk had gone back to years before, to the evening when I first saw her cross the drawing-room in a white dress, her gold hair hanging over her shoulders; and in that moment, as she crossed the room, I had noticed a look of recognition in her eyes; the look was purely instinctive; she was not aware of it herself, but I could not help understanding it as a look whereby she recognised me as one of her kin. I had often spoken to her of that look, and we liked speaking about it, and about the time when we became friends in Paris. She had written asking me to go to see her and her mother. I had found them in a strange little hotel, just starting for some distant suburb, going there to buy presents from an old couple, dealers in china and glass, from whom, Doris's mother explained, she would be able to buy her presents fifty per cent, cheaper than elsewhere. She was one of those women who would spend three shillings on a cab in order to save twopence on a vase. "It took us two hours to get to that old, forgotten quarter, to the old quaint street where they lived. They were old-world Jews who read the Talmud, and seemed to be quite isolated, out of touch with the modern world. It was like going back to the Middle Ages; this queer old couple moving like goblins among the china and glass. Do you ever see them now? Are they dead?" "Let me tell you," cried Doris, "what happened. The old man died two years ago, and his wife, who had lived with him for forty years, could not bear to live alone, so what do you think she did? She sent for her brother-in-law----" "To marry him?" "No, not to marry him, but to talk to him about her husband. You see this couple had lived together for so many years that she had become ingrained, as it were, in the personality of her late husband, her habits had become his habits, his thoughts had become hers. The story really is very funny," and Doris burst out laughing, and for some time she could not speak with laughing. "I am sorry for the poor man," she said at last. "For whom? For the brother-in-law?" "Yes; you see he is dyspeptic, and he can't eat the dishes at all that his brother used to like, but the wife can't and won't cook anything else." "In other words," I said, "the souvenir of brother Isaac is poisoning brother Jacob." "That is it." "What a strange place this world is!" And then my mind drifted back suddenly. "O Doris, I'm so unhappy--this place--I wish I had never come." "Now, now, have a little patience. Everything comes right in the end." "We shall never be alone." "Yes, we shall. Why do you think that?" "Because I can't think of anything else." "Well, you must think of something else. We're going to the factory where they make perfume, and I'm going to buy a great many bottles of scent for myself, and presents for friends. We shall be able to buy the perfume twenty-five per cent. or fifty per cent. cheaper." "Don't you think we might go to see the pictures? There are some in a church here." On inquiry we heard that they had been taken away, and I followed Doris through the perfume factory. Very little work was doing; the superintendent told us that they were waiting for the violets. A few old women were stirring caldrons, and I listened wearily, for it did not interest me in the least, particularly at that moment, to hear that the flowers were laid upon layers of grease, that the grease absorbed the perfume, and then the grease was got rid of by means of alcohol. The workrooms were cold and draughty, and the choice of what perfumes we were to buy took a long time. However, at last, Doris decided that she would prefer three bottles of this, three bottles of that, four of these, and two of those. Her perfume was heliotrope; she always used it. "And you like it, don't you dear?" "Yes, but what does it matter what I like?" "Now, don't be cross. Don't look so sad." "I don't mind the purchase you made for your friends, but the purchase of heliotrope is really too cynical." "Cynical! Why is it cynical?" "Because, dear, it is evocative of you, of that slender body moving among fragrances of scented cambrics, and breathing its own dear odour as I come forward to greet you. Why do you seek to torment me?" "But, dear one----" I was not to be appeased, and sat gloomily in the corner of the carriage away from her. But she put out her hand, and the silken palm calmed my nervous irritation, and we descended the steep roads, the driver putting on and taking off the brake. The evening was growing chilly, so I asked Doris if I might tell the coachman to stop his horses and to put up the hood of the carriage. In a close carriage one is nearly alone. But every moment I was reminded that people were passing, and between her kisses the thought passed that I must go back to Paris, however unkind it might be. It would be unkind to leave her, for she was not very strong; she would require somebody to look after her. As I was debating the question in my mind Doris said: "You don't mind, dear, but before we go back to the hotel, I have a visit to pay." In the three weeks' time she had spent at Plessy before I came there, Doris had made the acquaintance of all kinds of elderly spinsters, who lived in the different hotels _en pension_, and who would go away as soon as the visitors arrived, to seek another "resort" where the season had not yet commenced, and where they could be boarded and bedded for ten francs a day. I had made the acquaintance of Miss Tubbs and Miss Whitworth, and we were dining with them that night. Doris had explained that we could not refuse to dine with them at least once. "But as we're going to spend the evening with them, I don't see the necessity----" "Of course not, dear, but don't you remember you promised to go to see the Formans with me?" Miss Forman had dined with us last night, but her mother had not been able to come, and that was a relief to me whatever it may have been to Doris; I had heard that Mrs. Forman was a very old woman, and as her daughter struck me as an ineffectual person, I said as I sat down to dinner, "One of the family is enough." What her mother's age could be I could not guess, for Miss Forman herself might pass for seventy. But after speaking to her for a little while one saw that she was not so old as she looked at first sight. Nothing saddens me more than those who have aged prematurely, for the cause of premature ageing is generally a declension of the mind. As soon as the mind begins to narrow and wither the body follows suit; prejudices and conventions age us more than years do. Before speaking a word it was easy to see from Miss Forman's appearance that no new idea had entered into her life for a long while, and I imagined her at once to be one of those daughters that one finds abroad in different provincial towns, living with their mothers on small incomes. "The daughter's tragedy is written all over her face," I said, and while speaking to her I scrutinised her, reading in her everything that goes to make up that tragedy. She had the face of those heroines, for they are heroines--the broad low brow, the high nose, the sympathetic eyes, grey and expressive of duty and sacrifice of self. Her dress and her manners were as significant as her face, and seemed to hint at the life she had lived. She wore a black silk gown which looked old-fashioned--why I cannot say. Was it the gown or the piece of black lace that she wore on her head, or the Victorian earrings that hung from her ears down her dust-coloured neck, that gave her a sort of bygone appearance, the look of an old photograph? Her manners took me farther back in the century even than the photograph did; she seemed to have come out of the pages of some trite and uninteresting novel, a rather listless book written at the end of the eighteenth century, before the art of novel-writing had been found out. She listened, and her listening was in itself a politeness, and she never lost her politeness, though she seldom understood what I said. When I finished speaking she answered what I had said indirectly, like one whose mind was not quite capable of following any conversation except the most trite. She laughed if she thought I had said anything humourous, and sometimes looked a little embarrassed; she only seemed to be at her ease when speaking of her mother. If, for instance, we were speaking of books, she would break in with her mother's opinions, thinking it wonderful that her mother had read--shall we say, "The Three Musketeers?" three times. She was interested in all her mother's characteristics, and her habit was to speak of her mother as her mamma. She seemed to delight in the word, and every time she pronounced it a light came into her old face, and I began to understand her and to feel that I could place her, to use a colloquialism which is so expressive that perhaps its use may be forgiven. "The daughter's tragedy," I muttered, and considering it, philosophising according to my wont, I tried to reconcile myself to this visit. "After all," I said, "I am on my own business, therefore I have no right to grumble." I wished to see what Miss Forman was like in her own house; above all, I wished to see if her mother were as typical of the mother who accepts her daughter's sacrifice, as Miss Forman was of the daughter that has been sacrificed. From the daughter's appearance I had imagined Mrs. Forman to be a tall, good-looking, distinguished woman, lying upon a sofa, wearing a cap upon her white hair, her feet covered with a shawl, and Miss Forman arranging it from time to time. Nature is always surprising; she follows a rhythm of her own; we beat one, two, three, four, but the invisible leader of the orchestra sets a more subtle rhythm. But though Nature's rhythm is irregular, its irregularity is more apparent than real, for when we listen we hear that everything goes to a beat, and in looking at Mrs. Forman I recognised that she was the inevitable mother of such a daughter, and that Nature's combination was more harmonious than mine. The first thing that struck me was that the personal energy I had missed in the daughter survived in the mother, notwithstanding her seventy-five years. The daughter reminded me now of a tree that had been overshadowed; Miss Forman had remained a child, nor could she have grown to womanhood unless somebody had taken her away; no doubt somebody had wanted to marry her; there is nobody that has not had her love affair, very few at least, and I imagined Miss Forman giving up hers for the sake of her mamma, and I could hear her mamma--that short, thick woman, looking more like a ball of lard than anything else in the world, alert notwithstanding her sciatica, with two small beady eyes in the glaring whiteness of her face--forgetful of her daughter's sacrifice, saying to her some evening as they warmed their shins over the fire: "Well, Caroline, I never understood how it was that you didn't marry Mr. So-and-so, I think he would have suited you very well." My interest in these two women who had lived side by side all their lives was slight; it was just animated by a slight curiosity to see if Miss Forman would be as much interested in her mother in her own house by her mother's side as she had been in the hotel among strangers. I waited to hear her call her mother mamma; nor had I to wait long, for as soon as the conversation turned on the house which the Formans had lately purchased, and the land which Mrs. Forman was buying up and planting with orange trees, Miss Forman broke in, and in her high-pitched voice she told us enthusiastically that mamma was so energetic; she never could be induced to sit down and be quiet; even her sciatica could not keep her in her chair. A few moments after Miss Forman told us that they did not leave Plessy even during the summer heat. Mamma could not be induced to go away. The last time they had gone to a hill village intending to spend some three or four weeks there, but the food did not suit mamma at all, and Miss Forman explained how the critical moment came and she had said to her mamma, "Well, mamma, this place does not suit you; I think we had better go home again"; and they had come home after six days in the hill village, probably never to leave Plessy again; and turning to her mother with a look of admiration on her face Miss Forman said: "I always tell mamma that she will never be able to get away from here until balloon travelling comes into fashion. If a balloon were to come down to mamma's balcony, mamma might get into it and be induced to go away for a little while for a change of air. She would not be afraid. I don't think mamma was ever afraid of anything." Her voice seemed to me to attain a certain ecstasy in the words, "I don't think mamma was ever afraid of anything," and I said, "She is proud of her ideal, and it is well that she should be, for there is no other in the world, not for her at least," and noticing that the three women were talking together, that I was no longer observed, I got up with a view to studying the surroundings in which Mrs. Forman and her daughter lived. On the wall facing the fireplace there were two portraits--two engravings--and I did not need to look at the date to know that they had been done in 1840; one was her Majesty Queen Victoria, the other her Royal Consort, Prince Albert. Shall I be believed if I say that in my little excursions round the room and the next room I discovered a small rosewood table on which stood some wax fruit, a small sofa covered with rep and antimacassars, just as in old days? More characteristic still was the harmonium, with a hymn-book on the music rest, and every Sunday, no doubt, Miss Forman played hymns with her stiff, crooked fingers, and they said prayers together, the same old-fashioned English prayers for which I always hanker a little. Satisfied with the result of my quest, and fearing that it might be regarded as an impertinence if I stayed away any longer, I returned to the back drawing-room, only to accompany the Formans and Doris back again to the front drawing-room. There was a piano there. The Formans had persuaded Doris to sing, and she was going to do so to please them. "They don't know anything about singing," she whispered to me; "but what does that matter? You see, poor things, they have so little to distract them in their lives; it will be quite a little event for them to hear me sing," and she went to the piano and sang song after song. "It is kind indeed of you to sing to us, to an old woman and a middle-aged woman," Mrs. Forman said, "and I hope you will come to see us again, both of you." "What should bring me to see them again?" I asked myself as I tried to get Doris away, for she lingered about the doorway with them, making impossible plans, asking them to come to see her when they came to England, telling them that if her health required it and she came to Plessy again she would rush to see them. "Why should she go on like that, knowing well that we shall never see them again, never in this world?" I thought. Mrs. Forman insisted that her daughter should accompany us to the gate, and all the way there Doris begged of Miss Forman to come to dine with us; we were dining with Miss Tubbs and Miss Whitworth, friends of hers; it would be so nice if she would come. The carriage would be sent back for her; it would be so easy to send it back. I offered up a prayer that Miss Forman might refuse, and she did refuse many times; but Doris was so pressing that she consented; but when we got into the carriage a thought struck her. "No," she said, "I cannot go, for the dressmaker is coming this evening to try on mamma's dress, and mamma is very particular about her gowns; she hates any fulness in the waist; the last time the gown had to go back--you must excuse me." "Good-bye, dear, good-bye," I heard Doris crying, and I said to myself, "How kind she is!" "Now, my dear, aren't you glad that you came to see them? Aren't they nice? Isn't she good? And you like goodness." "Dear Doris, I like goodness, and I like to discover your kind heart. Don't you remember my saying that your pretty face was dependent upon your intelligence; that without your music and without your wit your face would lose half its charm? Well, now, do you know that it seems to me that it would only lose a third of its charm; for a third of my love for you is my admiration of your good heart. You remember how, years ago, I used to catch you doing acts of kindness? What has become of the two blind women you used to help?" "So you haven't forgotten them. You used to say that it was wonderful that a blind woman should be able to get her living." "Of course it is. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that any one should be able to earn his living." "You see, dear, you have not been forced to get yours, and you do not realise that ninety per cent of men and women have to get theirs." "But a blind woman! To get up in the morning and go out to earn enough money to pay for her dinner; think of it! Getting up in the dark, knowing that she must earn four, five, ten shillings a day, whatever it is. Every day the problem presents itself, and she always in the dark." "Do you remember her story?" "I think so. She was once rich, wasn't she? In fairly easy circumstances, and she lost her fortune. It all went away from her bit by bit. It is all coming back to me, how Fate in the story as you told it seemed like a black shadow stretching out a paw, grabbing some part of her income again and again till the last farthing was taken. Even then Fate was not satisfied, and your friend must catch the smallpox and lose her eyes. But as soon as she was well she decided to come to England and learn to be a masseuse. I suppose she did not want to stop in Australia, where she was known. How attractive courage is! And where shall we find an example of courage equal to that of this blind woman coming to England to learn to be a masseuse? What I don't understand is bearing with her life in the dark, going out to her work every day to earn her dinner, and very often robbed by the girl who led her about? "How well you remember, dear." "Of course I do. Now, how was it? Her next misfortune was a sentimental one. There was some sort of a love story in this blind woman's life, not the conventional, sentimental story which never happens, but a hint, a suggestion, of that passion which takes a hundred thousand shapes, finding its way even to a blind woman's life. Now don't tell me; it's all coming back to me. Something about a student who lived in the same house as she did; a very young man; and they made acquaintance on the stairs; they took to visiting each other; they became friends, but it was not with him she fell in love. This student had a pal who came to share his rooms, an older man with serious tastes, a great classical scholar, and he used to go down to read to the blind woman in the evening. It really was a very pretty story, and very true. He used to translate the Greek tragedies aloud to her. I wonder if she expected him to marry her?" "No, she knew he could not marry her, but that made no difference." "You're quite right. It was just the one interest in her life, and it was taken from her. He was a doctor, wasn't he?" Doris nodded, and I remembered how he had gone out to Africa. "No sooner did he get there than he caught a fever, one of the worst kinds. The poor blind masseuse did not hear anything of her loss for a long time. The friend upstairs didn't dare to come down to tell her. But at last the truth could be hidden from her no longer. It's extraordinary how tragedy follows some." "Isn't it?" "And now she sits alone in the dark. No one comes to read to her. But she bears with her solitude rather than put up with the pious people who would interest themselves in her. You said there were no interesting books written for the blind, only pieties. The charitable are often no better than Shylocks, they want their money's worth. I only see her, of course, through your description, but if I see her truly she was one of those who loved life, and life took everything from her!" "Do you remember the story of the other blind woman?" "Yes and no, vaguely. She was a singer, wasn't she?" Doris nodded. "And I think she was born blind, or lost her sight when she was three or four years old. You described her to me as a tall, handsome woman with dark, crinkly hair, and a mouth like red velvet." "I don't think I said like red velvet, dear." "Well, it doesn't sound like a woman's description of another woman, but I think you told me that she had had love affairs, and it was that that made me give her a mouth like red velvet. Why should she not have love affairs? She was as much a woman as another; only one doesn't realise until one hears a story of this kind what the life of the blind must be, how differently they must think and feel about things from those who see. Her lover must have been a wonder to her, something strange, mysterious; the blind must be more capable of love than anybody else. She wouldn't know if he were a man of forty or one of twenty. And what difference could it make to her?" "Ah, the blind are very sensitive, much more so than we are." "Perhaps." "I think Judith would have known the difference between a young man and a middle-aged. There was little she didn't know." "I daresay you're quite right. But still everything must have been more intense and vague. When the blind woman's lover is not speaking to her he is away; she is unable to follow him, and sitting at home she imagines him in society surrounded by others who are not blind. She doesn't know what eyes are, but she imagines them like--what? anyhow she imagines them more beautiful than they are. No, Doris, no eyes are more beautiful than yours; she imagines every one with eyes like yours. I have not thought of her much lately, but I used to think of her when you told me the story, as standing on a platform in front of the public, calm as a caryatid. She must have had a beautiful voice to have been able to get an engagement; and the great courage that these blind women have! Fancy the struggle to get an engagement, a difficult thing to do in any circumstances--but in hers! And when her voice began to fail her she must have suffered, for her voice was her one possession, the one thing that distinguished her from others, the one thing she knew herself by, her personality as it were. She didn't know her face as other women know theirs; she only knew herself when she sang, then she became an entity, as it were. Nor could teaching recompense her for what she had lost, however intelligent her pupils might be, or however well they paid her. How did she lose her pupils?" "I don't think there was any reason. She lost her pupils in the ordinary way; she was unlucky. As you were just saying, it was more difficult for her to earn her living than for those who could see, and Judith is no longer as young as she was; she isn't old, she is still a handsome woman, but in a few years.... If old-age pensions are to be granted to people, they surely ought to be granted to blind women." "Yes, I remember; the sentiment of the whole story is in my mind; only I am a little confused about the facts. I remember you wrote a lot of letters--how was it?" "Well, I just felt that the thing to do was to get an annuity for Judith; I could not afford to give her one myself; so after a great deal of trouble I got into communication with a rich woman who was interested in the blind and wanted to found one." "You are quite right, that was it. You must have written dozens of letters." "Yes, indeed, and all to no purpose. Judith knew the trouble I was taking, but she couldn't bear with her loneliness any longer; the dread of the long evenings by herself began to prey upon her nerves, and she went off to Peckham to marry a blind man--quite an elderly man; he was over sixty. They had known each other for some time, and he taught music like her; but though he only earned forty or fifty pounds a year, still she preferred to have somebody to live with than the annuity." "But I don't see why she should lose her annuity." "Don't you remember, dear? This to me is the point of the story. The charitable woman drew back, not from any sordid motive, because she regretted her money, but for a fixed idea; she had learned from somebody that blind people shouldn't marry, and she did not feel herself justified in giving her money to encouraging such marriages." "Was there ever anything so extraordinary as human nature? Its goodness, its stupidity, its cruelty! The woman meant well; one can't even hate her for it; it was just a lack of perception, a desire to live up to principles. That is what sets every one agog, trying to live up to principles, abstract ideas. If they only think of what they are and what others are! The folly of it! This puzzle-headed woman--I mean the charitable woman pondering over the fate of the race, as if she could do anything to advance or retard its destiny!" "You always liked those stories, dear. You said that you would write them." "Yes, but I'm afraid the pathos is a little deeper than I could reach; only Turgenieff could write them. But here we are at the Dog's Home." "Don't talk like that--it's unkind." "I don't mean to be unkind, but I have to try to realise things before I can appreciate them." It seemed not a little incongruous that these two little spinsters should pay for our dinners, and I tried to induce Doris to agree to some modification in the present arrangements, but she said it was their wish to entertain us. The evening I spent in that hotel hearing Doris sing, and myself talking literature to a company of about a dozen spinsters, all plain and elderly, all trying to live upon incomes varying from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds a year, comes up before my mind, every incident. Life is full of incidents, only our intelligence is not always sufficiently trained to perceive them; and the incident I am about to mention was important in the life I am describing. Miss Tubbs had asked me what wine I would drink. And in a moment of inadvertence I said "Vin Ordinaire," forgetting that the two shillings the wine would cost would probably mean that Miss Tubbs would very likely have to go without her cup of tea at five o'clock next day in order that her expenditure should not exceed her limit, and I thought how difficult life must be on these slippery rocks, incomes of one hundred and fifty a year. Poor little gentlefolk, roving about from one boarding-house to another, always in search of the cheapest, sometimes getting into boarding-houses where the cheapness of the food necessitates sending for the doctor, so the gain on one side is a loss on the other. Poor little gentlefolk, the odds-and-ends of existence, the pence and threepenny bits of human life! That Doris's singing should have provoked remarks painfully inadequate, mattered little. Inadequate remarks about singing and about the other arts are as common in London drawing-rooms as in hotels and boarding-houses (all hotels are boarding-houses; there is really no difference), and the company I found in these winter resorts would have interested me at any other time. I can be interested in the woman who collects stamps, in the gentle soul who keeps a botany book in which all kinds of quaint entries are found, in the lady who writes for the papers, and the one who is supposed to have a past. Wherever human beings collect there is always to be found somebody of interest, but when one's interest is centred in a lady, everybody else becomes an enemy; and I looked upon all these harmless spinsters as my enemies, and their proposals for excursions, and luncheons, and dinners caused me much misgiving, not only because they separated me from Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade Doris away from her friends. She was very kind and good and didn't inflict the society of these people too much upon me. Perhaps she was conscious of the danger herself, and we only visited the boarding-houses in the evening. But these visits grew intolerable. The society of Miss Tubbs and Miss Whitworth jarred the impressions of a long day spent in the open air, in a landscape where once the temples of the gods had been, where men had once lived who had seen, or at all events believed, in the fauns and the dryads, in the grotto where the siren swims. One afternoon I said to Doris: "I'm afraid I can't go to see Miss Tubbs this evening. Can't we devise something else? Another dinner in a boarding-house would lead me to suicide, I think." "You would like to drown yourself in that bay and join the nymphs. Do you think they would prove kinder than I?" I did not answer Doris. I suddenly seemed to despair; the exquisite tenderness of the sky, and the inveigling curves of the bay seemed to become detestable to me, theatrical, absurd. "Good God!" I thought: "I shall never win her love. All my journey is in vain, and all this love-making." The scene before me was the most beautiful in shape and colour I had ever seen; but I am in no mood to describe the Leonardo-like mountains enframing the azure bay. The reader must imagine us leaning over a low wall watching the sea water gurgling among the rocks. We had come to see some gardens. The waiter at my hotel had told me of some, the property of a gentleman kind enough to throw them open to the public twice a week; and I had taken his advice, though gardens find little favour with me--now and again an old English garden, but the well-kept horticultural is my abhorrence. But one cannot tell a coachman to drive along the road, one must tell him to go somewhere, so we had come to see what was to be seen. And all was as I had imagined it, only worse; the tall wrought-iron gate was twenty feet high, there was a naked pavilion behind it, and a woman seated at a table with a cash-box in front of her. This woman took a franc apiece, and told us that the money was to be devoted to a charitable purpose; we were then free to wander down a gravel walk twenty feet wide branching to the right and the left, along a line of closely clipped shrubs, with a bunch of tall grasses here and a foreign fir there; gardens that a painter would turn from in horror. I said to Doris: "This is as tedious as a play at the _Comédie_, as tiresome as a tragedy by Racine, and very like one. Let us seek out one of the external walks overlooking the sea; even there I'm afraid the knowledge that these shrubs are behind us will spoil our pleasure." Doris laughed; that was one of her charms, she could be amused; and it was in this mood that we sat down on a seat placed in a low wall overlooking the bay, looking at each other, basking in the rays of the afternoon sun, and there we sat for some little while indolent as lizards. Pointing to one at a little distance I said: "It is delightful to be here with you, Doris, but the sunlight is not sufficient for me. Doris, dear, I am very unhappy. I have lain awake all night thinking of you, and now I must tell you that yesterday I was sorely tempted to go down to that bay and join the nymphs there. Don't ask me if I believe that I should find a nymph to love me; one doesn't know what one believes, I only know that I am unhappy." "But why, dear, do you allow yourself to be unhappy? Look at that lizard. Isn't he nice? Isn't he satisfied? He desires nothing but what he has got, light and warmth." "And, Doris, would you like me to be as content as that lizard--to desire nothing more than light and warmth?" Doris looked at me, and thinking her eyes more beautiful even than the sunlight, I said: "'And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea, But what are all those kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?' "That is the eternal song of the spheres and of the flowers. If I don't become part of the great harmony, I must die." "But you do kiss me," Doris answered wilfully, "when the evening turns cold and the coachman puts up the hood of the carriage." "Wilful Doris! Pretty puss cat!" "I'm not a puss cat; I'm not playing with you, dear. I do assure you I feel the strain of these days; but what am I to do? You wouldn't have me tell you to stay at my hotel and to compromise myself before all these people?" "These people! Those boarding-houses are driving me mad! That Miss Forman!" "I thought you liked her. You said she is good, 'a simple, kind person, without pretensions.' And that is enough, according to yesterday's creed. You were never nicer than you were yesterday speaking of her (I remember your words): you said the flesh fades, the intellect withers, only the heart remembers. Do you recant all this?" "No, I recant nothing; only yesterday's truth is not to-day's. One day we are attracted by goodness, another day by beauty; and beauty has been calling me day after day: at first the call was heard far away like a horn in the woods, but now the call has become more imperative, and all the landscape is musical. Yesterday standing by those ancient ruins, it seemed to me as if I had been transported out of my present nature back to my original nature of two thousand years ago. The sight of those ancient columns quickened a new soul within me; or should I say a soul that had been overlaid began to emerge? The dead are never wholly dead; their ideas live in us. I am sure that in England I never appreciated you as intensely as I do here. Doris, I have learned to appreciate you like a work of art. It is the spirit of antiquity that has taken hold of me, that has risen out of the earth and claimed me. That hat I would put away----" "Don't you like my hat?" "Yes, I like it, but I am thinking of the Doris that lived two thousand years ago; she did not wear a hat. In imagination I see the nymph that is in you, though I may never see her with mortal eyes." "Why should you not see her, dear?" "I have begun to despair. All these boarding-houses and their inhabitants jar the spirit that this landscape has kindled within me. I want to go away with you where I may love you. I am afraid what I am saying may seem exaggerated, but it is quite true that you remind me of antiquity, and in a way that I cannot explain though it is quite clear to me." "But you do possess me, dear?" "No, Doris, not as I wish. This journey will be a bitter memory that will endure for ever; we must think not only of the day that we live, but of the days in front of us; we must store our memories as the squirrel stores nuts, we must have a winter hoard. If some way is not found out of this horrible dilemma, I shall remember you as a collector remembers a vase which a workman handed to him and which slipped and was broken, or like a vase that was stolen from him; I cannot find a perfect simile, at least not at this moment; my speech is imperfect, but you will understand." "Yes, I understand, I think I understand." "If I do not get you, it will seem to me that I have lived in vain." "But, dear one, things are not so bad as that. We need not be in Paris for some days yet, and though I cannot ask you to my hotel, there is no reason why----" "Doris, do not raise up false hopes." "I was only going to say, dear, that it does not seem to be necessary that we should go straight back to Paris." "You mean that we might stop somewhere at some old Roman town, at Arles in an eighteenth-century house. O Doris, how enchanting this would be! I hardly dare to think lest----" "Lest what, dear? Lest I should deceive you?" There was a delicious coo in her voice, the very love coo; it cannot be imitated any more than the death-rattle, and exalted and inspired by her promise of herself, of all herself, I spoke in praise of the eighteenth century, saying that it had loved antiquity better than the nineteenth, and had reproduced its spirit. "Is it not strange that, in the midst of reality, artistic conceptions always hang about me; but shall I ever possess you, Doris? Is it my delicious fate to spend three days with you in an old Roman town?" "There is no reason why it shouldn't be. Where shall it be?" "Any town would be sufficient with you, Doris; but let us think of some beautiful place"; and looking across the bay into the sunset, I recalled as many names as I could; many of those old Roman towns rose up before my eyes, classic remains mingling with mediaeval towers, cathedral spires rising over walls on which Roman sentries had once paced. We could only spend our honeymoon in a town with a beautiful name--a beautiful name was essential--a name that it would be a delight to remember for ever after; the name would have to express by some harmonious combination of syllables the loves that would be expended there. Rocomadour imitated too obviously the sound of sucking doves, and was rejected for that reason. Cahor tempted us, but it was too stern a name; its Italian name, Devona, appealed to us; but, after all, we could not think of Cahor as Devona. And for many reasons were rejected Armance, Vezelay, Oloron, Correz, Valat, and Gedre. Among these, only Armance gave us any serious pause. Armance! That evening and the next we studied _L'Indicateur des Chemins de fer_. "Armance," I said, interrupting Doris, who was telling me that we should lose our tickets by the _Côte d'Azur_. For in Doris's opinion it was necessary that we should leave Plessy by the _Côte d'Azur_. Her friends would certainly come to the station to see her off. "That is a matter of no moment," I said. "At Marseilles we can catch an express train, which will be nearly as good. There are two excellent trains; either will do, if you have decided to spend three days at Armance." She asked me if Armance were a village or a town, and I answered, "What matter?"--for everywhere in France there are good beds and good food and good wine--ay, and omelettes. We should do very well in any village in the south of France for three days. But suddenly two names caught my eye, Orelay and Verlancourt, and we agreed that we preferred either of these names to Armance. "Which name shall give shelter to two unfortunate lovers flying in search of solitude?" "Orelay is a beautiful name." "Orelay it shall be," I said. "We shall be able to get there from Marseilles in a few hours." "You see, dear, it would be impossible for me to travel all the way to Paris--a journey of at least twenty-four hours would kill me, and I'm not strong; nothing tires me more than railway traveling. We must stop somewhere. Why not at Orelay?" As this history can have only one merit, that of absolute truth, I must confess that the subterfuge whereby Doris sought to justify herself to herself, delighted me. Perhaps no quality is more human than that of subterfuge. She might unveil her body, but she could not unveil her soul. We may only lift a corner of the veil; he who would strip human nature naked and exhibit it displays a rattling skeleton, no more: where there is no subterfuge there is no life. This story will be read, no doubt, by the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, by the temperate and the intemperate, but the subject matter is so common to all men that it will interest every one, even ecclesiastics, every one except certain gentlemen residing chiefly in Constantinople, whose hostility to the lover on his errand is so well known, and so easily understandable, that I must renounce all hope of numbering them among the admirers of my own or Doris's frailty. But happily these gentlemen are rare in England, though it is suspected that one or two may be found among the reviewers on the staff of certain newspapers; otherwise how shall we account for the solitary falsetto voices in the choir of our daily and weekly press, shouting abstinence from the housetops? But with the exception of these few critics every one will find pleasure in this narrative; even in aged men and women enough sex is left to allow them to take an interest in a love story; in these modern days when the novel wanders even as far as the nuns in their cells (I have good authority for making this statement), perhaps I may be able to count upon an aged Mother Abbess to be, outwardly perhaps a disapproving, but at heart a sympathetic reader. Indeed, I count upon the ascetic more than upon any other class for appreciation, for the imagination of those who have had no experience in love adventures will enkindle, and they will appreciate perhaps more intensely than any other the mental trouble that a journey to Orelay with Doris would entail. It would take nearly five hours according to the time table to get from Marseilles to Orelay; and these five hours would wear themselves wearily away in conversation with Doris, in talking to her of every subject except the subject uppermost in my mind. I should have kept a notebook, just as I had arranged to do when I thought I was going on the yachting excursion among the Greek Islands with Gertrude; but, having no notes, I can only appeal to the reader's imagination. I must ask him to remember the week of cruel abstinence I had been through, and to take it into his consideration. My dear, dear reader, I am sure you can see me if you try (in your mind's eye, of course) walking about the corridors, seeking the guard, asking every one I meet: "How far away are we now from Orelay?" "Orelay? Nearly two hours from Orelay." Our heavy luggage had been sent on before, but we had a number of dressing cases and bags with us, and there might not be time to remove all these. The guard, who had promised to take them out of the carriage for us, might not arrive in time. However this might be, he was not to be found anywhere, and I sought him how many times up and down the long length of the train. You can see me, reader, can you not? walking about the train, imagining all kinds of catastrophes--that the train might break down, or that it might not stop at Orelay; or, a still more likely catastrophe, that the young lady might change her mind. What if that were to happen at the last moment! Ah, if that were to happen I should have perchance to throw myself out of the train, unless peradventure I refrained for the sake of writing the story of a lover's deception. The transitional stage is an intolerable one, and I wondered if Doris felt it as keenly, and every time I passed our carriage on my way up and down in search of the guard, I stopped a moment to study her face; she sat with her eyes closed, perhaps dozing. How prosaic of her to doze on the way to Orelay! Why was she not as agitated as I? And the question presented itself suddenly, Do women attach the same interest to love adventures as we do? Do women ask themselves as often as we do if God, the Devil, or Calamitous Fate will intervene between us and our pleasure? Will it be snatched out of our arms and from our lips? Perhaps never before, only once in any case, did I experience an excitement so lancinating as I experienced that day. And as I write the sad thought floats past that such expectations will never be my lot again. The delights of the moment are perhaps behind me, but why should I feel sad for that? Life is always beautiful, in age as well as in youth; the old have a joy that the youths do not know--recollection. It is through memory we know ourselves; without memory it might be said we have hardly lived at all, or only like animals. This is a point on which I would speak seriously to every reader, especially to my young readers; for it is of the utmost importance that every one should select adventures that not only please them at the moment, but can be looked back upon with admiration, and for which one can offer up a mute thanksgiving. My life would not have been complete, a corner-stone would have been lacking if Doris had not come to Orelay with me. Without her I should not have known the joy that perfect beauty gives; that beauty which haunted in antiquity would never have been known to me. But without more, as the lawyers say, we will return to Doris. I asked her if she had been asleep? No, she had not slept, only it rested her to keep her eyes closed, the sunlight fatigued her. I did not like to hear her talk of fatigue, and to hide from her what was passing in my mind I tried to invent some conversation. Orelay--what a lovely name it was! Did she think the town would vindicate or belie its name? She smiled faintly and said she would not feel fatigued as soon as she got out of the train, and there was some consolation in the thought that her health would not allow her to get farther that day than Orelay. We decided to stay at the Hôtel des Valois. One of the passengers had spoken to me of this hotel; he had never stayed there himself, but he believed it to be an excellent hotel. But it was not his recommendation that influenced me, it was the name--the Hôtel des Valois. How splendid! And when we got out at Orelay I asked the porters and the station-master if they could recommend a hotel. No, but they agreed that the Hôtel des Valois was as good as any other. We drove there wondering what it would be like. Everything had turned out well up to the present, but everything would go for naught if the Hôtel des Valois should prove unworthy of its name. And the first sight of it was certainly disappointing. Its courtyard was insignificant, only saved by a beautiful ilex tree growing in one corner. The next moment I noticed that the porch of the hotel was pretty and refined--a curious porch it was, giving the hotel for a moment the look of an eighteenth-century English country house. There were numerous windows with small panes, and one divined the hall beyond the porch. The hall delighted us, and I said to Doris as we passed through that the hotel must have been a nobleman's house some long while ago, when Orelay had a society of its own, perhaps a language, for in the seventeenth or the eighteenth century Provençal or some other dialect must have been written or spoken at Orelay. We admired the galleries overlooking the hall, and the staircase leading to them. We seemed to have been transported into the eighteenth century; the atmosphere was that of a Boucher, a provincial Boucher perhaps, but an eighteenth-century artist for all that. The doves that crowd round Aphrodite seemed to have led us right; and we foresaw a large quiet bedroom with an Aubusson carpet in the middle of a parquet floor, writing-tables in the corners of the room or in the silken-curtained windows. This was the kind of room I had imagined--one as large as a drawing-room, and furnished like a drawing-room, with sofas and arm-chairs that we could draw around the fire, and myself and Doris sitting there talking. Love is composed in a large measure of desire of intimacy, and if the affection that birds experience in making their nest be not imitated, love descends to the base satisfaction of animals which merely meet in obedience to an instinct, and separate as soon as the instinct has been served. Birds understand love better than all animals, except man. Who has not thought with admiration of the weaver-birds, and of our own native wren? But the rooms that were offered to us corresponded in no wise with those that we had imagined the doors of the beautiful galleries would lead us into. The French words _chambre meublée_ will convey an idea of the rooms we were shown into; for do not the words evoke a high bed pushed into the corner, an eider-down on top, a tall dusty window facing the bed, with skimpy red curtains and a vacant fireplace? There were, no doubt, a few chairs--but what chairs! The scene was at once tragic and comic. It was of vital importance to myself and Doris to find a room such as I have attempted to describe, and it was of equal indifference to the waiter whether we did or didn't. The appearance of each contributed to the character of the scene. Doris's appearance I have tried to make clear to the reader; mine must be imagined; it only remains for me to tell what the waiter was like; an old man, short and thick, slow on the feet from long service, enveloped in an enormous apron; one only saw the ends of his trousers and his head; and the head was one of the strangest ever seen, for there was not a hair upon it; he was bald as an egg, and his head was the shape of an egg, and the colour of an Easter egg, a pretty pink all over. The eyes were like a ferret's, small and restless and watery, a long nose and a straight drooping chin, and a thick provincial accent--that alone amused me. "Have you no other rooms?" "Nous n'avons que cela." I quote his words in the language in which they were spoken, for I remember how brutal they seemed, and how entirely in keeping with the character of the room. No doubt the words will seem flat and tame to the reader, but they never can seem that to me. "_Nous n'avons que cela_" will always be to me as pregnant with meaning as the famous _to be or not to be_. For it really amounted to that. I can see Doris standing by me, charming, graceful as a little Tanagra statuette, seemingly not aware of the degradation that the possession of her love would mean in such a room as that which we stood in; and I think I can honestly say that I wished we had never come to Orelay, that we had gone straight on to Paris. It were better even to sacrifice her love than that it should be degraded by vulgar circumstances; and, instead of a holy rite, my honeymoon had come to seem to me what the black mass must seem to the devout Christian. "The rooms will look better," Doris said, "when fires have been lighted, and when our bags are unpacked. A skirt thrown over the arm of a chair furnishes a room." Taking her hands in mine I kissed them, and was almost consoled; but at that moment my eyes fell upon the beds, and I said: "Those beds! O Doris, those beds! yours is no better than mine." Women are always satisfied, or they are kind, or they are wise; and accept the inevitable without a murmur. "Dearest, ask the waiter to bring us some hot water." I did so, and while he was away I paced the room, unable to think of anything but the high bed; it was impossible to put out of my sight the ridiculous spectacle of a couple in a nightgown and pyjama suit climbing into it. The vision of myself and Doris lying under that eider-down, facing that tall window, with nothing to shut out the light but those vulgar lace curtains, pursued me, and I paced the room till the pink waiter returned with two jugs; and then, feeling very miserable, I began to unpack my bag without getting further than the removal of the brushes and comb; Doris unpacked a few things, and she washed her hands, and I thought I might wash mine; but before I had finished washing them I left the dreadful basin, and going to Doris with dripping hands I said: "There is very little difference in the rooms. Perhaps you would like to sleep in mine?" "I can see no difference. I think I'll remain where I am." Which room she slept in may seem insignificant to the reader, but this is not so, for had we changed rooms this story would never have been written. I can see myself even now walking to and fro like a caged animal vainly seeking for a way of escape, till suddenly--my adventure reminds me very much of the beginning of many romantic novels--the tapestry that the wind had blown aside, the discovery of the secret door--suddenly I discovered a door in the wall paper; it was unlatched, and pushing through it I descended two steps, and lo! I was in the room of my heart's desire; a large, richly-coloured saloon with beautifully proportioned windows and red silk damask curtains hanging from carved cornices, and all the old gilding still upon them. And the silk fell into such graceful folds that the proportions of the windows were enhanced. And the walls were stretched with silk of a fine romantic design, the dominant note of which was red to match the curtains. There were wall lights, and a curious old clock on the marble chimney-piece amid branching candelabra. I stayed a moment to examine the clock, deciding very soon that it was not of much value ... it was made in Marseilles a hundred years ago. "A beautiful room in its proportions and in its colour," I said, and seeing another door ajar I went through it and discovered a bedroom likewise in red with two beds facing each other. The beds were high, it is true, and a phrase from a letter I had written to Doris, "aggressively virtuous," rose up in my mind as I looked upon them. But the curtains hung well from _les ciels de lit_ (one cannot say _cieux de lit_, I suppose)--the English word is, I think, "tester." "This room is far from the bedroom of my dreams," I muttered, "but _à la rigueur ça peut marcher_." But pursuing my quest a little farther, I came upon a spacious bedroom with two windows looking out on the courtyard--a room which would have satisfied the most imaginative lover, a room worthy of the adorable Doris, and I can say this as I look back fondly on her many various perfections. A great bed wide and low, "like a battlefield as our bed should be," I said, for the lines of the old poet were running in my head: "Madame, shall we undress you for the fight? The wars are naked that you make to-night." And, looking upon it, I stood there like one transfigured, filled with a great joy; for the curtains hanging from a graceful tester like a crown would have satisfied the painter Boucher.... He rarely painted bedrooms. I do not remember any at this moment; but I remember many by Fragonard, and Fragonard would have said: "I have no fault to find with that bed." The carpet was not Aubusson, but it was nevertheless a finely-designed carpet, and its colour was harmonious; the sofa was shapely enough, and the Louis XVI. arm-chairs were filled with deep cushions. I turned to the toilet-table fearing it might prove an incongruity, but it was in perfect keeping with the room, and I began at once to look forward to seeing it laid out with all the manifold ivories and silver of Doris's dressing-case. Imagine my flight, dear reader, if you can, back to Doris, whom I had left trying to make the best of that miserable square room; more like a prison cell than a bedroom. "What is the matter, dearest?" she asked. But without answering her I said, "Give me your hand," and led her as a prince leads his betrothed, in a fairy tale, through the richly-coloured salon, lingering a moment for her to admire it, and then I took her through my room, the double-bedded room, saying: "All this is nothing; wait till you see your room." And Doris paused overcome by the beauty of the bed, of the curtains falling from the tester gracefully as laburnum or acacia branches in June. "The rooms are beautiful, but a little cheerless." "Doris, Doris, you don't deserve to lie there! The windows of course must be opened, fresh air must be let in, and fires must be lighted. But think of you and me sitting here side by side talking before our bedtime." Fires were lighted quickly, servants came in bearing candelabra in their hands, and among them, and with Doris by my side, I imagined myself a prince, for who is a prince but he who possesses the most desirable thing in the world, who finds himself in the most delectable circumstances? And what circumstance is more delightful than sitting in a great shadowy bedroom, watching the logs burning, shedding their grateful heat through the room, for the logs that were brought to us, as we soon discovered, were not the soft wood grown for consumption in Parisian hotels; the logs that warmed our toes in Orelay were dense and hard as iron, and burned like coal, only more fragrantly, and very soon the bareness of the room disappeared; a petticoat, as Doris had said, thrown over a chair gives an inhabited look to a room at once; and the contents of her dressing-case, as I anticipated, took the room back to one hundred years ago, when some great lady sat there in a flowered silk gown before one of those inlaid dressing tables, filled with pigments and powders and glasses. There was one of those tables in the room, and I drew it from the corner and raised its lid, the lid with the looking-glass in it. And I liked the unpacking of her dressing-case, the discovery of a multitude of things for bodily use, the various sponges; the flat sponge for the face, the round sponge for the body, and the little sponges; all the scissors and the powder for the nails, and the scents, the soft silks, the lace scarfs, and the long silk nightgown soon to droop over her shoulders. My description by no means exhausts the many things she produced from her dressing-case and bags, nor would the most complete catalogue convey an impression of Doris's cleanliness of her little body! One would have to see her arranging her things, with her long curved hands and almond nails carefully cut--they were her immediate care, and many powders and ointments and polishers were called into requisition. Some reader will cry that all this is most unimportant, but he is either hypocritical or stupid, for it is only with scent and silk and artifices that we raise love from an instinct to a passion. "I am longing," said Doris, "to see that beautiful red drawing-room with all the candelabra lighted and half a dozen logs blazing on the hearth. It is extraordinary how cold it is." To procure an impartial mind, bodily ease is necessary, and we sat on either side of a splendid fire warming our toes. At the bottom of his heart every Christian feels, though he may not care to admit it in these modern days, that every attempt to make love a beautiful and pleasurable thing is a return to paganism. In his eyes the only excuse for man's love of woman is that without it the world would come to an end. Why he should consider the end of the world a misfortune I have never been able to find out, for if his creed be a true one the principal use of this world is to supply Hell with fuel. He is never weary of telling us that very few indeed may hope to get to Heaven. "But France is not a Christian country, and yet you see the high bed has not become extinct," said Doris. Doris, who was doubtless feeling a little tired, sat looking into the fire. Her attitude encouraged reverie; dream linked into dream till at last the chain of dreams was broken by the entrance of the pink waiter bringing in our dinner. In the afternoon I had called him an imbecile, which made him very angry, and he had explained that he was not an imbecile, but if I hurried him he lost his head altogether. Of course one is sorry for speaking rudely to a waiter; it is a shocking thing to do, and nothing but the appearance of the bedroom we were shown into would excuse me. His garrulousness, which was an irritation in the afternoon, was an amusement as he laid the cloth and told me the bill of fare; moreover, I had to consult him about the wine, and I liked to hear him telling me in his strong Southern accent of a certain wine of the country, as good as Pomard and as strong, and which would be known all over the world, only it did not bear transportation. Remembering how tired we were, and the verse-- "Quand on boit du Pomard on devient bon on aime, On devient aussi bon que le Pomard lui-même--" we drank, hoping that the wine would awaken us. But the effect of that strong Southern wine seemed to be more lethargic than exhilarating, and when dinner was over and we had returned to our seats by the fireside we were too weary to talk, and too nervous. The next morning, the coffee and the rolls and butter were ready before Doris, and the vexation of seeing the breakfast growing cold was recompensed by the pleasure of teasing her, urging her to pass her arms into her dressing-gown, to come as she was, it did not matter what she had on underneath. The waiter did not count; he was not a man, he was a waiter, a pink creature, pinker than anything in the world, except a baby's bottom, and looking very like that. "Hasten, dear, hasten!" and I went back to the salon and engaged in chatter with the old provincial, my English accent contrasting strangely with his. It was the first time I had heard the Southern accent. At Plessy I had heard all accents, Swiss, German, Italian; there was plenty of Parisian accent there, and I had told a Parisian flower-woman, whose husband was a Savoyard, that I declined to believe any more in the Southern accent _"C'est une blague qu'on m'a faite"_; but at Orelay I had discovered the true accent, and I listened to the old man for the sake of hearing it. He was asking me for my appreciation of the wine we had drunk last night when Doris entered in a foamy white dressing-gown. "You liked the wine, dear, didn't you? He wants to know if we will have the same wine for twelve-o'clock breakfast." "Dear me, it's eleven o'clock now," Doris answered, and she looked at the waiter. "Monsieur and Madame will go for a little walk; perhaps you would like to breakfast at one?" We agreed that we could not breakfast before one, and our waiter suggested a visit to the cathedral--it would fill up the time pleasantly and profitably; but Doris, when she had had her coffee, wanted to sit on my knee and to talk to me; and then there was a piano, and she wanted to play me some things, or rather I wanted to hear her. But the piano was a poor one; the notes did not come back, she said, and we talked for some hours without perceiving that the time was passing. After lunch the waiter again inquired if we intended to go for a little walk; there were vespers about four in the cathedral. "It would do Monsieur and Madame good." "The walk or the cathedral?" we inquired, and, a little embarrassed, the old fellow began to tell us that he had not been to the cathedral for some years, but the last time he was there he had been much impressed by the darkness. It was all he could do to find his way from pillar to pillar; he had nearly fallen over the few kneeling women who crouched there listening to the clergy intoning Latin verses. According to his account there were no windows anywhere except high up in the dome. And leaning his hands on the table, looking like all the waiters that ever existed or that will ever exist, his _tablier_, reaching nearly to his chin, upheld by strings passed over the shoulders, he told us that it was impossible to see what was happening in the chancel; but there had seemed to be a great number of clergy seated in the darkness at the back, for one heard voices behind the tall pieces of furniture singing Latin verses; one only heard the terminations of the words, an "us" and a "noster," and words ending in "e," and the organ always coming in a little late. "My good man," I said, "your description leaves nothing to be desired. Why should I go to the cathedral unless to verify your impressions? I am sure the service is exactly as you describe it, and I would not for the world destroy the picture you have evoked of those forgotten priests intoning their vespers in the middle of the granite church behind a three-branched candlestick." The poor man left the room very much disconcerted, feeling, Doris said, as if he had lost one of the forks. "Thank Heaven that matter is done with--a great weight is off my mind." "But there is the museum. You would like to see that?" said Doris, and a change came into my face. "Well, Doris, the waiter has told us that there is a celebrated study by David in the museum, 'The Nymph of Orelay.'" "But, dear one, am I not your nymph of Orelay?" and Doris slipped on her knees and put her arms about me. "Will I not do as well as the painted creature in the museum?" "Far better," I said, "far better. Now we are free, Doris, freed from the cathedral and from the museum. All the day belongs to us, and to-morrow we may pass as we like." "And so we will," Doris said meditatively; and so we did, dear reader, and I consider the time was well spent, for by so doing we avoided catching cold, a thing easy to do when a mistral is blowing. It was not until the following evening we remembered that time was always on the wing, that our little bags would have to be packed. Next morning we were going. "Going away by the train," Doris said regretfully. "Would we were going away in a carriage! We shall leave Orelay knowing nothing of it but this suite of apartments." "There is no reason why we should not drive," and I stopped packing my bag, and stood looking at her. "I wonder if we should have stayed three days if we had not discovered these rooms? Dear one, I think I should not have meant so much to you in those humbler rooms: you attach much importance to these cornices and hangings." "I should have loved you always, Doris, but I think I can love you better here," and with our bags in our hands we wandered from the bedroom into the drawing-room and stood admiring its bygone splendour. "Doris, dear, you must play me 'The Nut Bush.' I want to hear it on that old piano. Tinkle it, dear, tinkle it, and don't play 'The Nut Bush' too sentimentally, nor yet too gaily." "Which way will you have it?" she asked; "'a true love's truth or a light love's art'?" "I would have it dainty and fantastic as Schumann wrote it, 'only the song of a secret bird.'" "With a pathos of loneliness in it?" "That is it," I cried, "that is the right time to play it in, without stress on either side.... No, you mustn't leave the piano, Doris. Sing me some songs. Go on singing Schumann or Schubert; there are no other songs. Let me hear you sing 'The Moonlight' or 'The Lotus-flower.' Schumann and Schubert were the singing birds of the fifties; I love their romantic sentimentalities, orange gardens, south winds, a lake with a pinnace upon it, and a nightingale singing in a dark wood by a lonely shore; that is how they felt, how they dreamed." And resigning herself to my humour, she sang song after song till at last, awaking from a long reverie of music and old association of memories, I said, "Play me a waltz, Doris; I would hear an old-time waltz played in this room; its romantic flourishes will evoke the departed spirits." And very soon, sitting in my chair with half-closed eyes, it seemed to me that I saw crinolines faintly gliding over the floor, and white-stockinged feet, sloping shoulders and glistening necks with chignons--swan-like women, and long-whiskered cavaliers wearing peg-top trousers and braided coats dancing or talking with them.... The music suddenly stopped and Doris said: "If we are to catch our train we must go on with our packing." "You mustn't talk to me of trains," and overcome with a Schumann-like longing and melancholy I took her in my arms, overcome by her beauty. She was perfection. No Chelsea or Dresden figure was ever more dainty, gayer, or brighter. She was Schumann and Dresden, but a Dresden of an earlier period than Schumann; but why compare her to anything? She was Doris, the very embodiment of her name. "Ah, Doris, why are we leaving here? Why can't we remain here for ever?" "It is strange," she said; "I feel the charm of those old stately rooms as much as you do. But, dearest, we have missed the train." The pink waiter came up, I promised to hasten, but my love of Doris delayed us unduly, and we arrived at the station only to hear that the train had gone away some ten minutes before. The train that had left was the only good train in the day, and missing it had given us another twenty-four hours in Orelay; but Doris was superstitious. "Our three days are done," she said; "if we don't go today we shall go to-morrow, and to go on the fourth day would be unlucky. What shall we do all day? The spell has been broken. We have left our hotel. Let us take a carriage," she pleaded, "and drive to the next station. The sun is shining, and the country is beautiful; we saw it from the railway, a strange red country grey with olives, olive orchards extending to the very foot of the mountains, and mingling with the pine trees descending the slopes." "The slopes!" I said, "the precipitous sides of that high rock! Shall I ever forget it, beginning like the tail of a lion and rising up to the sky, towering above the level landscape like a sphinx." "The drive would be delightful!" "And it would be a continuation of the romance of the old Empire drawing-room. A post-chaise would be the thing if we could discover one." Sometimes Nature seems to conspire to carry out an idea, and though no veritable post-chaise of old time was discovered in the coach-house behind the courtyard in which the ilex trees flourished, we happened to catch sight of a carriage some twenty-five or thirty years old, a cumbersome old thing hung upon C springs, of the security of which the coachman seemed doubtful. He spoke disparagingly, telling us that the proprietor had been trying to sell it, but no one would buy it, so heavy was it on the horses' backs, so out of fashion one was ashamed to go out in it. The coachman's notions of beauty did not concern us, but Doris dreaded lest one of the wheels should come off; however, on examination it was found to be roadworthy, and I said to Doris as I helped her into it: "If it be no post-chaise, at all events ladies wearing crinolines have sat inside it, that is certain, and gentlemen wearing peg-top trousers with braid upon them. Good God, Doris, if you were to wear a crinoline I should love you beyond hope of repentance. Don't I remember when I was a boy every one wore white stockings; I had only heard of black ones, and I always hoped to meet a lady wearing black stockings... now my hope is to meet one wearing white." "We might have searched the town for a crinoline and a pair of white stockings." "Yes, and I might have discovered a black silk stock. I wonder how I should have looked in it. Doris," I said, "we have missed the best part of our adventure. We forgot to dress for the part we are playing, the lovers of Orelay." Who will disagree with me when I say that no adventure is complete unless it necessitates an amount of ceremonial, the wearing of wigs, high bodices, stockings, and breeches? Every one likes to dress himself up, whether for a masquerade ball or to be enrolled in some strange order. Have you, reader, ever seen any one enrolled in any of these orders? If you have, you will excuse the little comedy and believe it to be natural--the comedy that Doris and I played in the old carriage driving from Orelay to Verlancourt, where we hoped to breakfast. We could hardly speak for excitement. Doris thought of how she would look in a crinoline, and I remembered the illustrations in an early edition of Balzac of which I am the happy possessor. How nice the men looked in the light trousers and the black stockings of the period; and crossing my legs I followed with interest the line of my calf. Somebody did that in "Les Illusions Perdues." She and I lay back thinking which story in "The Human Comedy" was the most applicable to our case; and the only one we could think of was when Madame Bargeton, a provincial blue-stocking, left Angoulême for Paris with Lucien de Rubempré. There were no railways in the forties; they must have travelled in a post-chaise. Yes, I remember their journey, faintly it is true, but I remember it. Madame Bargeton was a woman of five-and-thirty at least, and Doris was much younger. Lucien was only one-and-twenty, and even at that time I was more than that. The names of these people and of the people they met at the theatre and in the Tuileries Gardens--Rastignac, Madame d'Espard, the Duchess of Chaulieu, Madame de Rochefide, and Canalis--carried my mind back from crinolines and white stockings, from peg-top trousers and braided coats, to the slim trousers that were almost breeches and to the high-breasted gowns of the Restoration. Our mothers and fathers wore the crinolines and the peg-top trousers, and our grandfathers the tight trousers and the black silk stocks. The remembrance of these costumes filled me with a tenderness and a melancholy I could not subdue, and I could see that Doris was thinking of the same subject as myself. We were thinking of that subject which interested men before history began, the mutability of human things, the vanishing of generations. Young as she was, Doris was thinking of death; nor is it the least extraordinary she should, for as soon as any one has reached the age of reflection the thought of death may come upon him at any moment, though he be in the middle of a ballroom or lying in the arms of his mistress. If the scene be a ballroom he has only to look outside, and the night will remind him that in a few years he will enter the eternal night; or if the scene be a bedroom the beautiful face of his mistress may perchance remind him of another whose face was equally beautiful and who is now under the earth; lesser things will suffice to recall his thoughts from life to death, a rose petal falling on a marble table, a dead bird in the path as he walks in his garden. And after the thought of death the most familiar thought is the decay of the bodily vesture. The first grey hair may seem to us an amusing accident, but very few years will pass before another and yet another appear, and if these do not succeed in reminding us that decay has begun, a black speck on a tooth cannot fail to do so; and when we go to the dentist to have it stopped we have begun to repair artificially the falling structure. The activity of youth soon passes, and its slenderness. I remember still the shock I felt on hearing an athlete say that he could no longer run races of a hundred yards; he was half a second or a quarter of a second slower than he was last year. I looked at him saying, "But you are only one-and-twenty," and he answered, "Yes, that is it." A football player I believe is out of date at eight-and-twenty. Out of date! What a pathos there is in the words--out of date! _Suranné_, as the French say. How are we to render it in English? By the beautiful but artificial word "yester-year"? Yester-year perhaps, for a sorrow clings about it; it conveys a sense of autumn, of "the long decline of roses." There is something ghostlike in the out-of-date. The landscape about Plessy had transported us back into antiquity, making us dream of nymphs and dryads, but the gilt cornices and damask hangings and the salon at Orelay had made us dream of a generation ago, of the youth of our parents. Ancient conveys no personal meaning, but the out-of-date transports us, as it were, to the stern of the vessel, throws us into a mournful attitude; we lean our heads upon our hands and, looking back, we see the white wake of the vessel with shores sinking in the horizon and the crests of the mountains passing away into the clouds. While musing on these abstract questions raised by my remark that we had not managed our adventure properly, since we had forgotten to provide ourselves with proper costumes, the present suddenly thrust itself upon me. "Good God!" I said to Doris, "let us look back, for we shall never see Orelay again!" and she from one window, and I from the other, saw the spires of Orelay for the last time. We could not tear ourselves away, but fortunately the road turned; Orelay was blotted out from our sight for ever, and we sank back to remember that a certain portion of our lives was over and done, a beautiful part of our lives had been thrown into the void, into the great rubble-heap of emotions that had been lived through, that are no more. "Of what are you thinking, dear? You have been far away. This is the first time we have been separated, and we are not yet five miles from Orelay." "Five miles! Ah, if it were only five!" We did not speak for a long time, and watching the midday sun, I thought that peradventure it was not farther from us than yesterday. Were I to say so to Doris she would answer, "It will be the same in Paris," but if she did it would be the first falsehood she had told me, for we both knew that things are never the same; things change--for better or worse, but they change. This last sentence seems to me somewhat trite, and if I were to continue this story any further my pen would run into many other superficial and facile observations, for my mind is no longer engrossed with the story. I no longer remember it; I do not mean that I do not remember whether we got to Verlancourt, whether we had breakfast, or whether we drove all the way to Paris with relays of horses. I am of course quite certain about the facts: we breakfasted at Verlancourt, and after breakfast we asked the coachman whether he would care to go on to Paris with us; he raised his eyes--"The carriage is a very old one, surely, Monsieur----" Doris and I laughed, for, truth to tell, we had been so abominably shaken that we were glad to exchange the picturesque old coach of our fathers' generation for the train. These stories are memories, not inventions, and an account of the days I spent in Paris would interest nobody; all the details are forgotten, and invention and remembrance do not agree any better than the goat and the cabbage. So, omitting all that does not interest me--and if it does not interest me how can it interest the reader?--I will tell merely that my adventure with Doris was barren of scandal or unpleasant consequences. Her mother, a dear unsuspicious woman--whether her credulity was the depth of folly or the depth of wisdom I know not; there are many such mothers, my blessing be upon them!--took charge of her daughter, and Doris and her mother returned to England. I am afraid that when I confess that I did not speak to Doris of marriage I shall forfeit the good opinion of my reader, who will, of course, think that a love story with such an agreeable creature as Doris merited a lifetime of devotion; but I pray the reader to discover an excuse for me in the fact that Doris had told me when we were at Plessy that there was no question of her marrying any one but Albert. Had she not sacrificed the great love of her life in order that she might remain constant to Albert? Is it to be expected, then, that having done that, she would put Albert aside and throw her lot in with mine? She might have done this; men and women act inconsequently. Having on one occasion refused to drop the mutton chop for the shadow, on the next occasion they would drop it for the shadow of the shadow; but Doris was made of sterner stuff, and some months afterwards she wrote me a steady, sensible little letter telling me that she was going to be married, and that it seemed to her quite natural that she should marry Albert. Years have passed away, and nothing has happened to lead me to believe that she has not proved a true and loving wife. Albert has always told me that he found all the qualities in her which he had foreseen from the first time he looked upon her pretty, sparkling face. Frown not, reader; accuse me not of superficial cynicism! Albert is part of the world's inheritance. You may be Albert yourself--every one has been or will be Albert; Albert is in us all, just as I am in you all. Doris, too, is in you, dear lady who sit reading my book--Doris my three-days mistress at Orelay, and Doris the faithful spouse of Albert for twenty years in a lonely London suburb. Study and boudoir would like to know if Doris had any children. About two years afterwards I heard that she was "expecting." The word came up spontaneously in my mind, perhaps because I had written it in the beginning of the story. Reader, do you remember in "Massimilla Doni" how Balzac, when he came to the last pages, declares that he dare not tell you the end of the adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal--_Massimilla Doni_ was "expecting." I have not read the story for many years, but the memory of it shines in my mind bright--well, as the morning star; and I looked up this last paragraph when I began to write this story, but had to excuse myself for not translating it, my pretext being that I was baffled by certain grammatical obscurities, or what seemed to me such. I seemed to understand and to admire it all till I came to the line that "_les peuplades de cent cathédrales gothiques_" (which might be rendered as the figured company of a hundred Gothic cathedrals), "_tout le peuple des figures qui brisent leur forme pour venir à vous, artistes compréhensifs, toutes ces angéliques filles incorporelles accoururent autour du lit de Massimilla, et y pleurèrent!_" What puzzles me is why statues should break their forms (_form_ I suppose should be translated by _mould_)--break their moulds--the expression seems very inadequate--break their moulds "in order to go to you, great imaginative artists." How could they break their moulds or their forms to go to the imaginative artists, the mould or the form being the gift of the imaginative artists? I should have understood Balzac better if he had said that the statues escape from their niches and the madonnas and the angels from their frames to gather round the bed of _Massimilla_ to weep. Balzac's idea seems to have got a little tangled, or maybe I am stupid to-day. However, here is the passage: "Les péris, les ondines, les fées, les sylphides du vieux temps, les muses de la Grèce, les vierges de marbre de la Certosa di Pavia, le Jour et la Nuit de Michel Ange, les petits anges que Bellini le premier mit au bas des tableaux d'église, et que Raphaël a faits si divinement au bas de la vierge au donataire, et de la madone qui gèle a Dresde, les délicieuses filles d'Orcagna, dans l'église de San-Michele à Florence, les ch�urs célestes du tombeau de Saint Sébald à Nuremberg, quelques vierges du Duomo de Milan, les peuplades de cent cathédrales gothiques, tout le peuple des figures qui brisent leur forme pour venir à vous, artistes compréhensifs, toutes ces angéliques filles incorporelles accoururent autour du lit de Massimilla, et y pleurèrent." CHAPTER IX IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS There was a time when my dream was not literature, but painting; and I remember an American giving me a commission to make a small copy of Ingres's "Perseus and Andromeda," and myself sitting on a high stool in the Luxembourg, trying to catch the terror of the head thrown back, of the arms widespread, chained to the rock, and the beauty of the foot advanced to the edge of the sea. Since my copying days the picture has been transferred to the Louvre. What has become of my copy, whether I ever finished it and received the money I had been promised, matters very little. Memories of an art that one has abandoned are not pleasant memories. Maybe the poor thing is in some Western state where the people are ignorant enough to accept it as a sketch for the original picture. My hope is that it has drifted away, and become part of the world's rubbish and dust. But why am I thinking of it at all? Only because a more interesting memory hangs upon it. After working at it all one morning, I left the museum feeling half satisfied with my drawing, but dreading the winged monster that awaited me after lunch. In those days I was poor, though rich for the Quarter. I moved in a society of art students, and we used to meet for breakfast in a queer little café; the meal cost us about a shilling. On my return from this café soon after twelve--I had breakfasted early that morning--I remember how, overcome by a sudden idleness, I could not go back to my work, and feeling that I must watch the birds and the sunlight (they seemed to understand each other so well), I threw myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes, smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself. Every one, or nearly every one, except perhaps the upper classes, whose ideas of Paris are the principal boulevards--the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue de la Paix--knows the Luxembourg Gardens; and watching April playing and listening to water trickling from a vase that a great stone Neptune held in his arms at the end of the alley, my thoughts embraced not only the garden, but all I know of Paris, of the old city that lies far away behind the Hôtel de Ville and behind the Boulevard St. Antoine. I thought of a certain palace now a museum, rarely visited, of its finely proportioned courtyard decorated with bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon. I had gone there a week ago with Mildred; but finding she had never heard of Madame de Sévigné, and did not care whether she had lived in this palace or another, I spoke to her of the Place des Vosges, saying we might go there, hoping that she would feel interested in it because it had once been the habitation of the old French nobility. As I spoke, its colour rose up before my eyes, pretty tones of yellow and brown brick, the wrought-iron railings and the high-pitched roofs and the slim chimneys. As I walked beside her I tried to remember if there were any colonnades. It is strange how one forgets; yes, and how one remembers. The Place des Vosges has always seemed to me something more than an exhibition of the most beautiful domestic architecture in France. The mind of a nation shapes itself, like rocks, by a process of slow accumulation, and it takes centuries to gather together an idea so characteristic as the Place des Vosges. One cannot view it--I cannot, at least--without thinking of the great monarchical centuries, and of the picturesque names which I have learned from Balzac's novels and from the history of France. In his "Étude de Catherine de Médicis," Balzac speaks of Madame de Sauve, and I am sure she must have lived in the Place des Vosges. Monsieur de Montresser might have occupied a flat on the first floor. Le Comte Bouverand de la Loyère, La Marquise d'Osmond, Le Comte de Coëtlogon, La Marquise de Villefranche, and Le Duc de Cadore, and many other names rise up in my mind, but I will not burden this story with them. I suppose the right thing to do would be to find out who had lived in the Place des Vosges; but the search, I am afraid, would prove tedious and perhaps not worth the trouble. For if none of the bearers of the names I have mentioned lived in the Place des Vosges, it is certain that others bearing equally noble names lived there. Its appearance is the same to-day as it was in the seventeenth century, but it is now inhabited by the small tradespeople of the Quarter; the last great person who lived there was Victor Hugo; his house has been converted into a museum, and it is there that the most interesting relics of the great poet are stored. I unburdened my mind to Mildred, and my enthusiasm enkindled in her an interest sufficient to induce her to go there with me, for I could not forgo a companion that day, though she was far from being the ideal companion for such sentimental prowling as mine. Afterwards we visited Notre Dame together, and the quays, and the old streets; but Mildred lacked the historical sense, I am afraid, for as we returned in the glow of the sunset, when the monumented Seine is most beautiful, she said that Paris wasn't bad for an old city, and it was the memory of this somewhat crude remark that caused a smile to light up my lips as I looked down the dark green alley through which the April sunlight flickered. But I did not think long of her; my attention was distracted by the beauty of a line of masonry striking across the pale spring sky, tender as a faded eighteenth-century silk, only the blue was a young blue like that of a newly opened flower; and it seemed to me that I could detect in the clouds going by, great designs for groups and single figures, and I compared this aerial sculpture with the sculpture on the roofs. In every angle of the palace there are statues, and in every corner of the gardens one finds groups or single figures. Ancient Rome had sixty thousand statues--a statue for every thirty-three or thirty-four inhabitants; in Paris the proportion of statues to the people is not so great, still there are a great many; no city has had so many since antiquity; and that is why Paris always reminds me of those great days of Greece and Rome when this world was the only world. When one tires of watching the sunlight there is no greater delight than to become absorbed in the beauty of the balustrades, the stately flights of steps, the long avenues of clipped limes, the shapely stone basins, every one monumented in some special way. "How shapely these gardens are," I said, and I fell to dreaming of many rocky hills where, at the entrance of cool caves, a Neptune lies, a vase in his arms with water flowing from it. Yesterevening I walked in these gardens with a sculptor; together we pondered Carpeau's fountain, and, after admiring Frémiet's horses, we went to Watteau's statue, appropriately placed in a dell, among greenswards like those he loved to paint. At this moment my meditation was broken. "I thought I should find you in the museum painting, but here you are, idling in this pretty alley, and in the evening you'll tell us you've been working all day." "Will you come for a walk?" I said, thinking that the gardens might interest her, and, if they did not, the people we should meet could not fail to amuse her. It was just the time to see the man who came every morning to feed the sparrows; he had taught them to take bread from his lips, and I thought that Mildred would like to see the funny little birds hopping about his feet, so quaint, so full of themselves, seeming to know all about it. Then if we had luck we might meet Robin Hood, for in those days a man used to wander in the gardens wearing the costume of the outlaw, and armed with a bow and quiver. The strange folk one meets in the Luxembourg Gardens are part of their charm. Had I not once met a man in armour, not plate, but the beautiful chain armour of the thirteenth century, sitting on a bench eating his lunch, his helmet beside him?--a model no doubt come from a studio for the lunch hour, or maybe he was an _exalté_ or a _fumist_; a very innocent _fumist_ if he were one, not one of the Quarter certainly, for even the youngest among us would know that it would take more than a suit of armour to astonish the frequenters of the gardens. As we came down a flight of steps we met an old man and his wife, an aged couple nearly seventy years of age, playing football, and the gambols of this ancient pair in the pretty April sunlight were pathetic to watch. I called her attention to them, telling her that in another part of the garden three old women came to dance; but seeing that Mildred was not interested, I took the first opportunity to talk of something else. She was more interested in the life of the Quarter, in _le bal Bullier_, in my stories of grisettes and students; and I noticed that she considered every student as he passed, his slim body buttoned tightly in a long frock-coat, with hair flowing over his shoulders from under his slouched hat, just as she had considered each man on board the boat a week ago as we crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne. We had met on the boat; I noticed her the moment I got on board; her quiet, neat clothes were unmistakably French, though not the florid French clothes Englishwomen so often buy and wear so badly. The stays she had on I thought must be one of those little ribbon stays with very few bones, and as she walked up and down she kept pressing her leather waistband still more neatly into its place, looking first over one shoulder and then over the other. She reminded me of a bird, so quick were her movements, and so alert. She was nice-looking, not exactly pretty, for her lips were thin, her mouth too tightly closed, the under lip almost disappearing, her eyes sloped up very much at the corners, and her eyebrows were black, and they nearly met. The next time I saw her she was beside me at dinner--we had come by chance to the same hotel, a small hotel in the Rue du Bac. Her mother was with her, an elderly, sedate Englishwoman, to whom the girl talked very affectionately, "Yes, dearest mamma"; "No, dearest mamma." She had a gay voice, though she never seemed to laugh or joke; but her face had a sad expression, and she sighed continually. After dinner her mother went to the piano and played with a great deal of accent and noise the "Brooklyn Cake Walk." "We used to dance that at Nice. Oh, dear mamma, do you remember that lovely two-step?" Her mother nodded and smiled, and began playing a Beethoven sonata, but she had not played many bars before her daughter said: "Now, mother, don't play any more; come and talk to us." I asked her if she did not like Beethoven. She shrugged her shoulders; an expression of irritation came into her face. She either did not want to talk of Beethoven then, or she was incapable of forming any opinion about him, and, judging from her interest in the "Brooklyn Cake Walk," I said: "The Cake Walk is gayer, isn't it?" The sarcasm seemed lost upon her; she sat looking at me with a vague expression in her eyes, and I found it impossible to say whether it was indifference or stupidity. "Mildred plays Beethoven beautifully. My daughter loves music. She plays the violin better than anybody you ever heard in your life." "Well, she must play very well indeed, for I've heard Sarasate and----" "If Mildred would only practise," and she pressed her daughter to play something for me. "I haven't got my keys--they're upstairs. No, mother ... leave me alone; I'm thinking of other things." Her mother went back to the piano and continued the sonata. Mildred looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and then turned over the illustrated papers, saying they were stupid. We began to talk about foreign travel, and I learned that she and her mother spent only a small part of every year in England. She liked the Continent much better; English clothes were detestable; English pictures she did not know anything about, but suspected they must be pretty bad, or else why had I come to France to paint? She admitted, however, she had met some nice Englishmen, but Yankees--oh! Yankees! There was one at Biarritz. Do you know Biarritz? No, nor Italy. Italians are nice, are they not? There was one at Cannes. "Don't think I'm not interested in hearing about pictures, because I am, but I must look at your ring, it's so like mine. This one was given to me by an Irishman, who said the curse of Moreen Dhu would be upon me if I gave it away." "But who is Moreen Dhu? I never heard of her." "You mustn't ask me; I'm not a bit an intelligent woman. People always get sick of me if they see me two days running." "I doubt very much if that is true. If it were you wouldn't say it." "Why not? I shouldn't have thought of saying it if it weren't true." Next evening at dinner I noticed that she was dressed more carefully than usual; she wore a cream-coloured gown with a cerise waistband and a cerise bow at the side of her neck. I noticed, too, that she talked less; she seemed preoccupied. And after dinner she seemed anxious; I could not help thinking that she wished her mamma away, and was searching for an excuse to send her to bed. "Mamma, dear, won't you play us the 'Impassionata'?" "But, Milly dear, you know quite well that I can't play it." Mamma was nevertheless persuaded to play not only the "Impassionata" but her entire repertoire. She was not allowed to leave the piano, and had begun to play Sydney Smith when the door opened, and a man's face appeared for a second. Remembering her interest in men, I said: "Did you see that man? What a nice, fresh-looking young man!" She put her finger on her lip, and wrote on a piece of paper: "Not a word. He's my fiancé, and mother doesn't know he's here. She does not approve; he hasn't a bean." ... "Thank you, mother, thank you; you played that sonata very nicely." "Won't you play, my dear?" "No, mother dear, I'm feeling rather tired; we've had a long day." And the two bade me good-night, leaving me alone in the sitting-room to finish a letter. But I had not quite got down to the signature when she came in looking very agitated, even a little frightened. "Isn't it awful?" she said. "I was in the dining-room with my fiancé, and the waiter caught us kissing. I had to beg of him not to tell mamma. He said _'Foi de gentilhomme,_' so I suppose it's all right." "Why not have your fiancé in here? I'm going to bed." "Oh, no, I wouldn't think of turning you out. I'll see him in my bedroom; it's safer, and if one's conscience is clear it doesn't matter what people say." A few days afterwards, as I was slinging my paintbox over my shoulders, I heard some one stop in the passage, and speaking to me through the open door she said: "You were so awfully decent the other night when Donald looked in. I know you will think it cheek; I am the most impudent woman in the world; but do you mind my telling mamma that I am going to the Louvre with you to see the pictures? You won't give me away, will you?" "I never split on any one." "My poor darling ought to go back. He's away from the office without leave, and he may get the sack; but he's going to stay another night. Can you come now? Mamma is in the salon. Come just to say a word to her and we will go out together. Donald is waiting at the corner." Next morning as I was shaving I heard a knock at my door. "_Entré!_" "Oh, I beg your pardon, but I didn't want to miss you. I'll wait for you in the salon." When I came downstairs she showed me a wedding ring. She had married Donald, or said she had. "Oh, I am tired. I hate going to the shops, and now mamma wants me to go shopping with her. Can't you stay and talk to me, and later on we might sneak out together and go somewhere?... Are you painting to-day?" "Well, no, I'm going to a museum a long way from here. I have never seen Madame de Sévigné's house." "Who is she?" "The woman who wrote the famous letters." "I am afraid I shall only bore you, because I can't talk about books." "You had better come; you can't stay in this hotel by yourself all the morning." There was some reason which I have forgotten why she could not go out with Donald, and I suppose it was my curiosity in all things human that persuaded me to yield to her desire to accompany me, though, as I told her, I was going to visit Madame de Sévigné's house. The reader doubtless remembers that we visited not only Madame de Sévigné's house, but also Victor Hugo's in the Place des Vosges, and perhaps her remark as we returned home in the evening along the quays, that "Paris wasn't bad for an old city," has not yet slipped out of the reader's memory. For it was a strange remark, and one could hardly hear it without feeling an interest in the speaker; at least, that was how I felt. It was that remark that drew my attention to her again, and when we stopped before the door of our hotel, I remembered that I had spent the day talking to her about things that could have no meaning for her. Madame de Sévigné and Jean Goujon, old Paris and its associated ideas could have been studied on another occasion, but an opportunity of studying Mildred might never occur again. I was dining out that evening; the next day I did not see her, and the day after, as I sat in the Luxembourg Gardens, beguiled from my work by the pretty April sunlight and the birds in the alley (I have spoken already of these things), as I sat admiring them, a thought of Mildred sprang into my mind, a sudden fear that I might never see her again; and it was just when I had begun to feel that I would like to walk about the gardens with her that I heard her voice. These coincidences often occur, yet we always think them strange, almost providential. The reader knows how I rose to meet her, and how I asked her to come for a walk in the gardens. Very soon we turned in the direction of the museum, for, thinking to propitiate me, Mildred suggested I should take her there, and I did not like to refuse, though I feared some of the pictures and statues might distract me from the end I now had in view, which was to find out if Donald had been her first lover, and if her dear little mamma suspected anything. "So your mother knows nothing about your marriage?" "Nothing. He ought to go back, but he's going to stay another night. I think I told you. Poor dear little mamma, she never suspected a bit." As we walked to the museum I caught glimpses of what Donald's past life had been, learning incidentally that his father was rich, but since Donald was sixteen he had been considered a ne'er-do-well. He had gone away to sea when he was a boy, and had been third mate on a merchant ship; in a hotel in America he had been a boot-black, and just before he came to Paris he fought a drunken stoker and won a purse of five pounds. She asked me which were the best pictures, but she could not keep her attention fixed, and her attempts to remember the names of the painters were pathetic. "Ingres, did you say? I must try to remember.... Puvis de Chavannes? What a curious name! but I do like his picture. He has given that man Donald's shoulders," she said, laying her hand on my arm and stopping me before a picture of a young naked man sitting amid some grey rocks, with grey trees and a grey sky. The young man in the picture had dark curly hair, and Mildred said she would like to sit by him and put her hands through his hair. "He has got big muscles, just like Donald. I like a man to be strong: I hate a little man." We wandered on talking of love and lovers, our conversation occasionally interrupted, for however interested I was in Mildred, and I was very much interested, the sight of a picture sometimes called away my attention. When we came to the sculpture-room it seemed to me that Mildred was more interested in sculpture than in painting, for she stopped suddenly before Rodin's "L'age d'arain," and I began to wonder if her mind were really accessible to the beauty of the sculptor's art, or if her interest were entirely in the model that had posed before Rodin. Sculpture is a more primitive art than painting; sculpture and music are the two primitive arts, and they are therefore open to the appreciation of the vulgar; at least, that is how I tried to correlate Mildred with Rodin, and at the same moment the thought rose up in my mind that one so interested in sex as Mildred was could not be without interest in art. For though it be true that sex is antecedent to art, art was enlisted in the service of sex very early in the history of the race, and has, if a colloquialism may be allowed here, done yeoman service ever since. Even in modern days, notwithstanding the invention of the telephone and the motor car, we are still dependent upon art for the beginning of our courtships. To-day the courtship begins by the man and the woman sending each other books. Before books were invented music served the purpose of the lover. For when man ceased to capture woman, he went to the river's edge and cut a reed and made it into a flute and played it for her pleasure; and when he had won her with his music he began to take an interest in the tune for its own sake. Amusing thoughts like these floated through my mind in the Luxembourg galleries--how could it be otherwise since I was there with Mildred?--and I began to argue that it was not likely that one so highly strung as Mildred could be blind to the sculptor's dream of a slender boy, and that boy, too, swaying like a lily in some ecstasy of efflorescence. "The only fault I find with him is that he is not long enough from the knee to the foot, and the thigh seems too long. I like the greater length to be from the knee to the foot rather than from the knee to the hip. Now, have I said anything foolish?" "Not the least. I think you are right. I prefer your proportions. A short tibia is not pretty." A look of reverie came into her eyes. "I don't know if I told you that we are going to Italy next week?" "Yes, you told me." Her thoughts jerked off at right angles, and turning her back on the statue, she began to tell me how she had made Donald's acquaintance. She and her mother were then living in a boarding-house in the same square in which Donald's father lived, and they used to walk in the square, and one day as she was running home trying to escape a shower, he had come forward with his umbrella. That was in July, a few days before she went away to Tenby for a month. It was at Tenby she had become intimate with Toby Wells; he had succeeded for a time in putting Donald out of her mind. She had met Toby at Nice. "But you like Donald much better than Toby?" "Of course I do; he came here to marry me. Oh, yes, I've forgotten all about Toby. You see, I met Donald when I went back to London. But do look at that woman's back; see where her head is. I wonder what made Rodin put a woman in that position." She looked at me, and there was a look of curious inquiry on her face. Overcome with a sudden shyness, I hastened to assure her that the statue was "La Danaide." "Rodin often introduces a trivial voluptuousness into art; and his sculpture may be sometimes called _l'article de Paris_. It is occasionally soiled by the sentiment, of which Gounod is the great exponent, a base soul who poured a sort of bath-water melody down the back of every woman he met, Margaret or Madeline, it was all the same." "Clearly this is not a day to walk about a picture-gallery with you. Come, let us sit down, and we'll talk about lighter things, about lovers. You won't mind telling me; you know you can trust me. One of these days you will meet a man who will absorb you utterly, and all these passing passions will wax to one passion that will know no change." "Do you think so? I wonder." "Do you doubt it?" "I don't think any one man could absorb me; no one man could fill my life." "Not even Donald?" "Donald is wonderful. Do you remember that morning, a few days after we arrived?" "Your wedding night?" "Yes, my wedding night." We are interested in any one who is himself or herself, and this girl was certainly herself and nothing but herself. Travelling about as she did with her quiet, respectable mother, who never suspected anything, she seemed to indicate a type--type is hardly the word, for she was an exception. Never had I seen any one like her before, her frankness and her daring; here at least was one who had the courage of her instincts. She was man-crazy if you will, but now and then I caught sight of another Mildred when she sighed, when that little dissatisfied look appeared in her face, and the other Mildred only floated up for a moment like a water-flower or weed on the surface of a stream. "... You know I do mean to be a good girl. I think one ought to be good. But really, if you read the Bible----Oh, must you go?--it has been such a relief talking things over with you. Shall I see you to-night? There is no one else in the hotel I can talk to, and mamma will play the piano, and when, she plays Beethoven it gets upon my nerves." "You play the violin, don't you?" "Yes, I play," and that peculiar sad look which I had begun to think was characteristic of her came into her face, and I asked myself if this sudden misting of expression should be ascribed to stupidity or to a sudden thought or emotion. "I am sorry you're not dining at the hotel." "I am sorry, too; I'm dining with students in the Quarter; they would amuse you." "I wish I were a grisette." "If you were I would take you with me. Now I must say good-bye; I have to get on with my painting." That night I returned to the hotel late and went away early in the morning. But the next day she came upon me again in the gardens, and as we walked on together she told me that Donald had gone away. "He was obliged to return, you see; he left the office without leave, and he had only two pounds, the poor darling. I don't know if I told you that he had to borrow two pounds to come here." "No, you omitted that little fact. You see, you are so absorbed in yourself that you think all these things are as interesting to everybody else as they are to you." "Now you're unkind," and she looked at me reproachfully. "It is the first time you have been unsympathetic. If I talked to you it was because I thought my chatter interested you. Moreover, I believed that you were a little interested in me, and I have come all this way--" My heart was touched, and I begged of her to believe that my remark was only uttered in sport, to tease her. But it was a long time before I could get her to finish the sentence. "You have come a long way, you said--" "I came to tell you that we are going to Rome tomorrow. I didn't like to go away without seeing you, but it seems as if I were mistaken; it would not have mattered to you if I had." She had her fiddle-case with her; and to offer to carry it for her seemed an easy way out of my difficulty; but she would not surrender it for a while. I asked her if she had been playing at a concert, or if she were coming from a lesson. No; well, then, why had she her fiddle-case with her? "Don't ask me; leave me in peace. It doesn't matter. I cannot play now, and ten minutes ago my head was full of it." These little ebullitions of temper were common in Mildred, and I knew that the present one would soon pass away. In order that its passing might be accomplished as rapidly as possible, I suggested we should sit down, and I spoke to her of Donald. "I don't want to talk about him. You have offended me." "I'm sorry you are leaving Paris. This is the beautiful month. How pleasant it is here, a soft diffused warmth in the air, the sunlight flickering like a live thing in the leaves, and the sound of water dripping at the end of the alley. We are all alone here, Mildred. Come, tell me why you brought your fiddle-case." "Well," she said, "I brought it on the chance of meeting you. I thought you might like to hear me play. We are going away to-morrow morning. I can't play in that hotel, in that stuffy little room; mamma would want to accompany me." "Play to me in the Luxembourg Gardens!" "One can do anything one likes here; no one pays any attention to anybody else," and she pointed with her parasol to a long poet, with hair floating over his shoulders, who walked up and down the other end of the alley reciting his verses. "Perhaps your playing will interrupt him." "Oh, if he doesn't like it he'll move away. But I don't want to play; I can't play when I'm out of humour, and I was just in the very humour for playing until your remark about--" "About what?" "You know very well," she answered. The desire to hear her play the fiddle in the gardens gained upon me. The moment was an enchanting one, the light falling through the translucid leaves and the poet walking up and down carried my thoughts into another age. I began to see a picture--myself, the poet, and this girl playing the violin for us; other figures were wanting to make up the composition. Cabanel's picture of the Florentine poet intruded itself, interrupting my vision, the picture of Dante reading his verses at one end of a stone bench to a frightened girl whose lover is drawing her away from him who had been to Hell and witnessed the tortures of the damned, who had met the miserable lovers of Rimini whirling through space and heard their story from them. Lizard-like, a man lies along a low wall, listening to the poet's story. But why describe a picture so well known? Why mention it at all? Only because its design intruded itself, spoiling my dream, an abortive idea that I dimly perceived in Nature without being able to grasp it; an illusive suggestion for a picture was passing by me, and so eager was my pursuit of the vision that there was no strength in me to ask Mildred to play. True that the sound of her violin might help me, but it must happen accidentally, just as everything else was happening, without sequence, without logic. At that moment my ear caught the sound of violin-playing; some dance measure of old time was being played, and in the sunlit interspace three women appeared dancing a gavotte, advancing and retiring through the light and shade. The one who played the violin leaned sometimes against a tree, and sometimes she joined the others, playing as she danced. "I know that gavotte. Come, let us go to them. I'll play for them if they'll let me." Very soon the woman who played the violin seemed to recognise Mildred as a better player than herself. She handed her fiddle to a bystander and the gavotte proceeded, the three old ladies bowing and holding up their skirts and pointing their toes with the grace of bygone times. Never, I think, did reality seem more like a dream. "But who are these three women?" I asked myself, and, sinking on a bench like one enchanted, I dreamed that these were three sisters, the remnant of a noble family who had lost its money during several generations till at last nothing remained, and the poor old women had to devise some mode of earning their living. I imagined the scene in some great house which they would have to leave on the morrow, and they talking together, thinking they must go forth to beg, till she who played the fiddle said that something would happen to save them from the shame of mendicancy. I imagined her saying that their last crust of bread would not be eaten before some one would come to tell them that a fortune awaited them. And it so happened that the day they divided this crust the one to whom faith had been given came upon an old letter. She stood reading till the others asked her what she was reading with so much interest. "I told you," she said, "that we should be saved, that God in His great mercy would not turn us out into the streets to beg. This letter contains explicit directions how the gavotte used to be danced when our ancestors lived in the Place des Vosges." "But what help to us to know the true step of the gavotte?" cried the youngest sister. "A great deal," the eldest answered gravely; "I can play the fiddle, and we can all learn to dance; we'll go to dance the gavotte in the Luxembourg Gardens whenever it is fine--the true gavotte as it was danced when Madame de Sévigné drove up in a painted coach drawn by six horses, and entered the courtyard of her hotel decorated with bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon." This is the story that I dreamed as I sat on the bench listening to the pretty, sprightly music flowing like a live thing. Under the fingers of the old woman the music scratched along like dead leaves along a pathway, without accent, without rhythm; now the old gavotte tripped like the springtime, pretty as the budding trees, as the sunlight along the swards. Mildred brought out the contrast between the detached and the slurred notes. How gaily it went! Full of the fashion of the time--the wigs, the swords, the bows, the gallantry! How sedate! How charming! How well she understood it! How well the old women danced to it! How delighted every one was! She played on until the old women, unable to dance any more, sat down to listen to her. After trying some few things which I did not know, I heard her playing a piece of music which I could not but think I had heard before--in church! Beginning it on the low string, she poured out the long, long phrase that never seems to end, so stern and so evocative of Protestantism that I could not but think of a soul going forth on its way to the Judgment Seat, telling perforce as it goes how it has desired and sought salvation, pleading almost defiantly. But Mildred could not appreciate such religious exaltation, yet it was her playing that had inspired the thought in me. Had she been taught to play it? Was she echoing another's thought? Her playing did not sound like an echo; it seemed to come from the heart, or out of some unconscious self, an ante-natal self that in her present incarnation only emerged in music, borne up by some mysterious current to be sucked down by another. She played other things, not certain what she was going to play; and then, as if suddenly moved to tell us about other things, she began to play a very simple, singing melody, interrupted now and again, so it seemed to me, by little fluttering confessions. I seemed to see a lady in white, at the close of day, in a dusky boudoir, one of Alfred Stevens's women, only much more refined, one whose lover has been unfaithful to her, or maybe a woman who is weary of lovers and knows not what to turn her mind to, hesitating between the convent and the ball-room. Ah, the beautiful lament--how well Mildred played it!--followed by the slight crescendo, and then the return of the soul upon itself, bewailing its weakness, confessing its follies in elegant, lovely language, seemingly speaking in a casual way, yet saying such profound things, profound even as Bach. The form is different, more light, more graceful, apparently more superficial, but just as deep; for when we go to the bottom of things all things are deep, one as deep as another, just as all things are shallow, one as shallow as another; for have not mystics of every age held that things exist not in themselves, but in the eye that sees and the ear that hears? A crowd had collected to hear her, for she was playing out of the great silence that is in every soul, in that of the light-o'-love as well as of the saint, and she went on playing, apparently unaware of the number of people she had collected about her. She stopped playing and returned to me. "You play beautifully; why did you say you didn't like Beethoven?" "I didn't say I didn't like Beethoven; you know very well mamma can't play the 'Impassionata.'" "Why aren't you always like this?" "I don't know. One can't always be the same. I feel differently when I play; the mood only comes over me sometimes. I used to play a great deal; I only play occasionally now, just when I feel like it." We walked through the alleys by the statues, seeing them hardly at all, thinking of the music. "I must be getting back," she said. "You see, I've got to pack up. Mother can't do any packing; I've to do hers for her. I hope we shall meet again some day." "What good would it be? I only like you when you're playing, and you're not often in the mood." "I'm sorry for that; perhaps if you knew me better----" "Now you're married, and I suppose Donald will come to Rome to fetch you?" "Oh, I don't think he'll be able. He has got no money." "And you'll fall in love with some one else?" "Well, perhaps so; I don't feel that I ever could again after this week." Stopping suddenly in front of a hosier's shop, she said: "I like those collars; they have just come out--those turned-down ones. Do you like them as well as the great high stand-up collars about three inches deep? When they were the fashion men could hardly move their heads." Then she made some remarks about neckties and the colour she liked best--violet. "Yes, there's a nice shade of violet. Poor Donald! He's so handsome." After the hosier's shop she spoke no more about music. And long before we reached the hotel she who had played--I cannot say for certain what she played that day in the Luxembourg Gardens; my love of music was not then fully awakened; could it have been?--the names of Bach and Chopin come up in my mind--"I can't speak about music," she said, as we turned into the Rue du Bac, and she ran up the stairs of the hotel possessed completely by the other Mildred. She asked her mother to play the "Brooklyn Cake Walk," and she danced "the lovely two-step," as she had learned it at Nice, for my enjoyment. I noticed that she looked extraordinarily comic as she skipped up and down the room, the line of her chin deflected, and that always gives a slightly comic look to a face. She came downstairs with me, and, standing at the hotel door, she told me of something that had happened yesterday. "Mother and I went to Cook's to get the tickets. When we went into the office I saw a Yank--oh, so nicely dressed! Lovely patent-leather boots. And I thought, 'Oh, dear, he'll never look at me.' But presently he did, and took out his card-case and folded up a card and put it on the ledge behind him, and gave me a look and moved away. So I walked over and took it up. Mamma never saw, but the clerks did." * * * * * I have reported Mildred's story truthfully at a particular moment of her life. Those who travel meet people now and again whose individuality is so strong that it survives. Mildred's has survived many years, and I have written this account of it because it seems to me to throw a gleam into the mystery of life without, however, doing anything to destroy the mystery. CHAPTER X A REMEMBRANCE It was in the vastness of Westminster Hall that I saw her for the first time--saw her pointed face, her red hair, her brilliant teeth. The next time was in her own home--a farm-house that had been rebuilt and was half a villa. At the back were wheat-stacks, a noisy thrashing-machine, a pigeon-cote, and stables whence, with jangle of harness and cries of yokels, the great farm-horses always seemed to be coming from or going to their work on the downs. In a garden planted with variegated firs she tended her flowers all day; and in the parlour, where we assembled in the evening, her husband smoked his pipe in silence; the young ladies, their blonde hair hanging down their backs, played waltzes; she alone talked. Her conversation was effusive, her laughter abundant and bright. I had only just turned eighteen, and was deeply interested in religious problems, and one day I told her the book I carried in my pocket, and sometimes pretended to study, was Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." My explanation of the value of the work did not seem to strike her, and her manifest want of interest in the discussion of religious problems surprised me, for she passed for a religious woman, and I failed to understand how mere belief could satisfy any one. One day in the greenhouse, whither I had wandered, she interrupted some allusion to the chapter entitled "The Deduction of the Categories" with a burst of laughter, and declared that she would call me Kant. The nickname was not adopted by the rest of the family--another was invented which appealed more to their imagination--but she held to the name she had given me, and during the course of our long friendship never addressed me by any other. There was no reason why I should have become the friend of these people. We were opposed in character and temperament, but somehow we seemed to suit. There was little reflection on either side; certainly there was none on mine; at that time I was incapable of any; my youth was a vague dream, and my friends were the shadows on the dream. I saw and understood them only as one sees and understands the summer clouds when, lying at length in the tall grass, one watches the clouds curl and uncurl. In such mood, visit succeeded visit, and before I was aware, the old Squire who walked about the downs in a tall hat died, and my friends moved into the family place, distant about a hundred yards--an Italian house, sheltered among the elms that grew along the seashore. And in their new house they became to me more real than shadows; they were then like figures on a stage, and the building of the new wing and the planting of the new garden interested me as might an incident in a play; and I left them as I might leave a play, taking up another thread in life, thinking very little of them, if I thought at all. Years passed, and after a long absence abroad I met them by chance in London. Again visit succeeded visit. My friends were the same as when I had left them; their house was the same, the conduct of their lives was the same. I do not think I was conscious of any change until, one day, walking with one of the girls in the garden, a sensation of home came upon me. I seemed always to have known these people; they seemed part and parcel of my life. It was a sudden and enchanting awaking of love; life seemed to lengthen out like the fields at dawn, and to become distinct and real in many new and unimagined ways. Above all, I was surprised to find myself admiring her who, fifteen years ago, had appeared to me not a little dowdy. She was now fifty-five, but such an age seemed impossible for so girl-like a figure and such young and effusive laughter. I was, however, sure that she was fifteen years older than when I first saw her, but those fifteen years had brought each within range of the other's understanding and sympathy. We became companions. I noticed what dresses she wore, and told her which I liked her best in. She was only cross with me when I surprised her in the potting-shed wearing an old bonnet out of which hung a faded poppy. She used to cry: "Don't look at me, Kant. I know I'm like an old gipsy woman." "You look charming," I said, "in that old bonnet." She put down the watering-can and laughingly took it from her head. "It is a regular show." "Not at all. You look charming when working in the greenhouse.... I like you better like that than when you are dressed to go to Brighton." "Do you?... I thought you liked me best in my new black silk." "I think I like you equally well at all times." We looked at each other. There was an accent of love in our friendship. "And strange, is it not," I said, "I did not admire you half as much when I knew you first?" "How was that? I was quite a young woman then." "Yes," I said, regretting my own words; "but, don't you see, at that time I was a mere boy--I lived in a dream, hardly seeing what passed around me." "Yes, of course," she said gaily, "you were so young then, all you saw in me was a woman with a grown-up son." Her dress was pinned up, she held in her hand the bonnet which she said made her look like an old gipsy woman, and the sunlight fell on the red hair, now grown a little thinner, but each of the immaculate teeth was an elegant piece of statuary, and not a wrinkle was there on that pretty, vixen-like face. Her figure especially showed no signs of age, and if she and her daughters were in the room it was she I admired. One day, while seeking through the store-room for a sheet of brown paper to pack up a book in, I came across a pile of old _Athenaeums_. Had I happened upon a set of drawings by Raphael I could not have been more astonished. Not one, but twenty copies of the _Athenaeum_ in a house where never a book was read. I looked at the dates--three-and-thirty years ago. At that moment she was gathering some withering apples from the floor. "Whoever," I cried, "could have left these copies of the _Athenaeum_ here?" "Oh, they are my _Athenaeums_," she said. "I always used to read the _Athenaeum_ when I was engaged to be married to Mr. Bartlett. You must have heard of him--he wrote that famous book about the Euphrates. I was very fond of reading in those days, and he and I used to talk about books in the old garden at Wandsworth. It is all built over now." This sudden discovery of dead tastes and sympathies seemed to draw us closer together, and in the quietness of the store-room, amid the odour of the apples, her face flushed with all the spirit of her girlhood, and I understood her as if I had lived it with her. "You must have been a delightful girl. I believe if I had known you then I should have asked you to marry me." "I believe you would, Kant.... So you thought because I never read books now that I had never read any? You have no idea how fond of books I was once, and if I had married Mr. Bartlett I believe I should have been quite a blue-stocking. But then Dick came, and my father thought it a more suitable match, and I had young children to look after. We were very poor in those days; the old Squire never attempted to help us." At this time I seemed to be always with my friends; I came to see them when I pleased, and sometimes I stayed a week, sometimes I stayed six months: but however long my visit they said it was not long enough. The five-o'clock from London brought me down in time for dinner, and I used to run up to my room just as if I were a member of the family. If I missed this train and came down by the six-o'clock, I found them at dinner, and then the lamplight seemed to accentuate our affectionate intimacy, and to pass round the table shaking hands with them all was in itself a peculiar delight. On one of these occasions, missing her from her place, I said: "Surely you have not allowed her to remain till this hour in the garden?" I was told that she was ill, and had been for the last fortnight confined to her room. Several days passed; allusion to her illness became more frequent; and then I heard that the local doctor would accept the responsibility no longer, and had demanded a consultation with a London physician. But she would not hear of so much expense for her sake, and declared herself to be quite sufficiently well to go to London. The little pony-carriage took her to the station, and I saw her in the waiting-room wrapped up in shawls. She was ashamed to see me, but in truth the disease had not changed her as she thought it had. There are some who are so beautiful that disease cannot deform them, and she was endowed with such exquisite life that she would turn to smile back on you over the brink of the grave. We thought the train was taking her from us for ever, but she came back hopeful. Operation had been pronounced unnecessary, but she remained in her room many days before the medicine had reduced her sufficiently to allow her to come downstairs. Nearly a month passed, and then she appeared looking strangely well, and every day she grew better until she regained her girlish figure and the quick dance of movement which was a grace and a joy in the silent peacefulness of the old house. Her grace and lightness were astonishing, and one day, coming down dressed to go in the carriage, she raced across the library, opened her escritoire, hunting through its innumerable drawers for one of the sums of money which she kept there wrapped up in pieces of paper. "How nice you look! You are quite well now, and your figure is like a girl of fifteen." She turned and looked at me with that love in her face which an old woman feels for a young man who is something less and something more to her than her son. As a flush of summer lingers in autumn's face, so does a sensation of sex float in such an affection. There is something strangely tender in the yearning of the young man for the decadent charms of her whom he regards as the mother of his election, and who, at the same time, suggests to him the girl he would have loved if time had not robbed him of her youth. There is a waywardness in such an affection that formal man knows not of. I remember that day, for it was the last time I saw her beautiful. Soon after we noticed that she did not quite recover, and we thought it was because she did not take her medicine regularly. She spent long hours alone in her greenhouse, the hot sun playing fiercely on her back, and we supplicated--I was the foremost among her supplicators--that she would not carry the heavy flower-pots to and fro, nor cans of water from the tank at the bottom of the garden, and to save her I undertook to water her flowers for her. But she was one of those who would do everything herself--who thought that if she did not shut the door it was not properly shut. She was always speaking of her work. "If I leave my work," she would say, "even for one week, everything gets so behind-hand that I despair of ever being able to make up the arrear. The worst of it is that no one can take up my work where I leave off." And as she grew worse this idea developed until it became a kind of craze. At last, speculating on the strength of our friendship, I told her her life belonged to her husband and children, and that she had no right to squander it in this fashion. I urged that with ordinary forbearance she might live for twenty years, but at the present rate of force-expenditure she could not hope to live long. I spoke brutally, but she smiled, knowing how much I loved her; and, looking back, it seems to me she must have known she could not be saved, and preferred to give the last summer of her life entirely to her flowers. It was pathetic to see her, poor moribund one, sitting through the long noons alone, the sun beating in upon her through the fiery glass, tending her flowers. I remember how she used to come in in the evenings exhausted, and lie down on the little sofa. Her husband, with an anxious, quiet, kindly look in his eyes, used to draw the skirt over her feet and sit down at her feet, tender, loving, soliciting the right to clasp her hand, as if they had not been married thirty years, but were only sweethearts. At that time we used all to implore her to allow us to send for the London doctor, and I remember how proud I was when she looked up and said, "Very well, Kant, it shall be as you wish it." I remember, too, waiting by the little wood at the corner of the lane, where I should be sure to meet the doctor as he came up from the station. The old elms were beautiful with green, the sky was beautiful with blue, and we lingered, looking out on the fair pasturage where the sheep moved so peacefully, and, with the exquisite warmth of summer in our flesh, we talked of her who was to die. "Is it then incurable?" "There is no such thing as cure.... We cannot create, we can only stimulate an existent force, and every time we stimulate we weaken, and so on until exhaustion. Our drugs merely precipitate the end." "Then there is no hope?" "I'm afraid not." "Can she live for five years?" "I should think it extremely improbable." "What length of life do you give her?" "You are asking too much.... I should say about a year." The doctor passed up the leafy avenue. I remained looking at the silly sheep, seeing in all the green landscape only a dark, narrow space. That day I saw her for the last time. She was sitting on a low chair, very ill indeed, and the voice, weak, but still young and pure, said: "Is that you, Kant? Come round here and let me look at you." Amid my work in London, I used to receive letters from my friends, letters telling me of the march of the disease, and with each letter death grew more and more realisable until her death seemed to stand in person before me. It could not be much longer delayed, and the letter came which told me that "Mother was not expected to live through the winter." Soon after came another letter: "Mother will not live another month"; and this was followed by a telegram: "Mother is dying; come at once." It was a bleak and gusty afternoon in the depth of winter, and the Sunday train stopped at every station, and the journey dragged its jogging length of four hours out to the weary end. The little station shivered by an icy sea, and going up the lane the wind rattled and beat my face like an iron. I hurried, looking through the trees for the lights that would shine across the park if she were not dead, and welcome indeed to my eyes were the gleaming yellow squares. Slipping in the back way, and meeting the butler in the passage, I said: "How is she?" "Very bad indeed, sir." She did not die that night, nor the next, nor yet the next; and as we waited for death, slow but sure of foot, to come and take what remained of her from us, I thought often of the degradation that these lingering deaths impose upon the watchers, and how they force into disgraceful prominence all that is animal in us. For, however great our grief may be, we must eat and drink, and must even talk of other things than the beloved one whom we are about to lose; for we may not escape from our shameful nature. And, eating and drinking, we commented on the news that came hourly from the sickroom: "Mother will not live the week." A few days after, "Mother will hardly get over Sunday"; and the following week, "Mother will not pass the night." Lunch was the meal that shocked me most, and I often thought, "She is dying upstairs while we are eating jam tarts." One day I had to ride over the downs for some letters, and when, on my return, I walked in from the stables, I met her son. He was in tears, and sobbing he said: "My dear old chap, it is all over; she is gone." I took his hand and burst into tears. Then one of her daughters came downstairs and I was told how she had passed away. A few hours before she died she had asked for a silk thread; for thirty years, before sleeping, she always passed one between her beautiful teeth. Her poor arms were shrunken to the very bone and were not larger than a little child's. Haggard and over-worn, she was lifted up, and the silk was given to her and the glass was held before her; but her eyes were glazed with death, and she fell back exhausted. Then her breathing grew thicker, and at last and quite suddenly, she realised that she was about to die; and looking round wildly, not seeing those who were collected about her bed, she said, "Oh, to die when so much remains undone! How will they get on without me!" I helped to write the letters, so melancholy, so conventional, and expressing so little of our grief, and the while the girls sat weaving wreaths for the dead, and at every hour wreaths and letters of sympathy arrived. The girls went upstairs where the dead lay, and when they returned they told me how beautiful their mother looked. And during those dreadful days, how many times did I refuse to look on her dead! My memory of her was an intensely living thing, and I could not be persuaded to sacrifice it. We thought the day would never come, but it came. There was a copious lunch, cigars were smoked, the crops, the price of lambs, and the hunting, which the frost had much interfered with, were alluded to furtively, and the conversation was interspersed with references to the excellent qualities of the deceased. I remember the weather was beautiful, full of pure sunlight, with the colour of the coming spring in the face of the heavens. And the funeral procession wound along the barren sea road, the lily-covered coffin on a trolley drawn by the estate labourers. That day every slightest line and every colour of that bitter, barren coast impressed themselves on my mind, and I saw more distinctly than I had ever done before the old church with red-brown roofs and square dogmatic tower, the forlorn village, the grey undulations of the dreary hills, whose ring of trees showed aloft like a plume. In the church the faces of the girls were discomposed with grief, and they wept hysterically in each other's arms. The querulous voice of the organ, the hideous hymn, and the grating voice of the aged parson standing in white surplice on the altar-steps! Dear heart! I saw thee in thy garden while others looked unto that sunless hole, while old men, white-haired and tottering, impelled by senile curiosity, pressed forward and looked down into that comfortless hole. The crowd quickly dispersed; the relatives and the friends of the deceased, as they returned home, sought those who were most agreeable and sympathetic, and matters of private interest were discussed. Those who had come from a distance consulted their watches, and an apology to life was implicit in their looks, and the time they had surrendered to something outside of life evidently struck them as being strangely disproportionate. The sunlight laughed along the sea, and the young corn was thick in the fields; leaves were beginning in the branches, larks rose higher and higher, disappearing in the pale air, and, as we approached the plantations, the amorous cawing of the rooks sounded pleasantly in the ear. The appearance of death in the springtime, at the moment when the world renews its life, touched my soul with that anguish which the familiar spectacle has always and will never fail to cause as long as a human heart beats beneath the heavens. And, dropping behind the chattering crowd that in mourning-weed wended its way through the sad spring landscape, I thought of her whom I had loved so long and should never see again. I thought of memory as a shrine where we can worship without shame, of friendship, and of the pure escapement it offers us from our natural instincts; I remembered that there is love other than that which the young man offers to her he would take to wife, and I knew how much more intense and strangely personal was my love of her than the love which that day I saw the world offering to its creatures. CHAPTER XI BRING IN THE LAMP For many days there has not been a wind in the trees, and the landscape reminds me of a somnambulist--the same silence, the same mystery, the same awe. The thick foliage of the ash never stirs; even the fingery leaves hanging out from the topmost twigs are still. The hawthorns growing out of a tumbled wall are turning yellow and brown, the hollyhocks are over, the chrysanthemums are beginning. Last night a faint pink sky melted into the solemn blue of midnight. There were few stars; Jupiter, wearisomely brilliant, sailed overhead; red Mars hung above the horizon under a round, decorative moon.... The last days of September! and every day the light dies a few minutes earlier. At half-past five one perceives a chilliness about one's feet; no doubt there is a touch of frost in the air; that is why the leaves hang so plaintively. There is certainly a touch of frost in the air, and one is tempted to put a match to the fire. It is difficult to say whether one feels cold or whether one desires the company of the blaze. Tea is over, the dusk gathers, and the brute Despondency lurks in the corners. At the close of day, when one's work is over, benumbing thoughts arise in the study and in the studio. Think of a painter of architecture finishing the thirty-sixth pillar (there are forty-three). The dusk has interrupted his labour, and an ache begins in his heart as he rises from the easel. Be his talent great or little, he must ask himself who will care should he leave the last seven pillars unfinished? Think of the writer of stories! Two, three, or four more stories are required to make up a requisite number of pages. The dusk has interrupted his labour, and he rises from his writing-table asking who will care whether the last stories are written or left unwritten? If he write them his ideas will flicker green for a brief springtime, they will enjoy a little summer; when his garden is fading in the autumn his leaves will be well-nigh forgotten; winter will overtake them sooner than it overtakes his garden, perhaps. The flowers he deemed immortal are more mortal than the rose. "Why," he asks, "should any one be interested in my stories any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year? Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. But the horse is pumping water--water is necessary; but art, even if his work is good enough to be called art, is not, so far as he knows, necessary to any one. Whosoever he may be, proof is not wanting that the world can do well without his work. But however sure he may feel that that is so, and in the hours I describe it seems sure indeed, he will have to continue his labour. Man was born to labour, as the oldest texts say; he must continue to drive his furrow to the end of the field, otherwise he would lie down and die of sheer boredom, or go mad. He asks himself why he became a maker of idols. "An idol-maker, an idol-maker," he cries, "who can find no worshippers for his wares! Better the sailor before the mast or the soldier in the field." His thoughts break away, and he begins to dream of a life of action. It would be a fine thing, he thinks, to start away in a ship for South America, where there are forests and mountain ranges almost unknown. He has read of the wild shepherds of the Pampas. So inured are they to horseback that they cannot walk a mile without resting; and sitting by the fire at the end of the autumn day, he can see them galloping through the long grass of the Pampas, whirling three balls attached by leather thongs. The weapon is called the bolus, and flying through the air it encircles the legs of the guana, bringing it to the earth. But if he went to America, would he find content in a hunter's life? Can the artist put by his dreams and find content in the hunter's life? His dreams would follow him, and sitting by the camp-fire in the evening he would begin to think how he might paint the shadows or tell of the uncouth life of those who sat around him eating of jerked meat. No, there is nothing for him but to follow the furrow; he will have to write stories till his brain fades or death intervenes. And what story shall he write to complete his book, since it must be completed, it forming part of the procession of things? The best part of story-writing is the seeking for the subject. Now there is a sound of church bells in the still air, beautiful sounds of peace and long tradition, and he likes to listen, thinking of the hymns and the homely sermons of the good minister. Shall he get up and go? Perhaps the service would soothe his despondency; but there is not courage enough in his heart. He can do no more than strike a match; the fire lights up. It is one of those autumn afternoons with just that touch of frost in the air which makes a fire welcome, and as he crouches in his arm-chair the warmth soothes the spirit and flesh, and in the doze of the flesh the spirit awakes. What--is the story coming now? Yes; it is forming independently of his will, and he says, "Let it take shape." And the scene that rises up in his mind is a ball-room; he sees women all arow, delicate necks and arms of young girls, and young men in black collected about the doorways. Some couples are moving to the rhythm of a languorous waltz, a French imitation of Strauss, a waltz never played now, forgotten perhaps by everybody but him--a waltz he heard twenty long years ago. That waltz has lain ever since forgotten in his brain, but now he hears it all; never before was he able to remember that _coda_, and it comes with a scent of violets in it--the perfume of a little blond woman who dreams as she dances with the young man blond as herself. Let it be that the choice was made by her rather than by him, and let her wear _crêpe de chime_, with perhaps a touch of white somewhere, and a white frill about her neck. Let her be a widow whose husband died six months after marriage, six months ago. Let her have come from some distant part of the world, from America--Baltimore will do as well as any other, perhaps better, for the dreamer by the fire has no faintest notion whether Baltimore lies in the middle of a plain or surrounded by mountains, whether it be built of marble or brick or stone. Let her come from Baltimore, from some prettily named street--Cathedral Street--there must be a Cathedral Street in Baltimore. The sound of the church bells in the air no doubt led the dreamer to choose Cathedral Street for her to live in.... The dance would have to be an informal one, some little dance that she might come to though her husband was dead only six months. Coming from America, she would be dancing the sliding Boston step, and the two together would pass between the different groups sliding forward and back, avoiding the dancer here, and reappearing from behind a group of French men and women bumping up and down, hammering the floor, the men holding the women as if they were guitars. An American widow dances, her hand upon her partner's shoulder, fitting herself into him, finding a nook between his arm and side, and her head is leaned upon his shoulder. She follows his every step; when he reverses there is never a hitch or jolt; they are always going to the same rhythm. How delicious are these moments of sex and rhythm, and how intense if the woman should take a little handkerchief edged with black and thrust it into her dancer's cuff with some little murmur implying that she wishes him to keep it. To whomsoever these things happen life becomes a song. A little event of this kind lifts one out of the humdrum of material existence. I suppose the cause of our extraordinary happiness is that one is again, as it were, marching in step; one has dropped into the Great Procession and is actively doing the great Work. There is no denying it, that in these moments of sex one does feel more conscious than at any other time of rhythm, and, after all, rhythm is joy. It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the young man's life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing together. And he sings as he passes the _concierge's_ lodge, pitying the poor couple asleep--what do they know of love? Humble beasts unable to experience the joy of rhythm. Exalted he goes upstairs; he is on rhythm bent, words follow ideas, rhymes follow words, and he sits down at his writing-table and drawing forth a sheet of paper he writes. A song moves within him, a fragrant song of blond hair and perfume--the handkerchief inspires him, and he must get the rondel perfect: a rondel, or something like a rondel, which he will read to her tomorrow, for she has appointed to meet him--where? No better place for lovers than the garden of L'Église de la Trinité. His night passes in shallow sleep; but his wakings are delicious, for at every awaking he perceives a faint odour of violets. He dreams of blond hair and how carefully he will dress himself in the morning! Would she like him better in his yellow or his grey trousers? Or should he wear a violet or a grey necktie? These are the questions that are important; and what more important questions are there for a young man of twenty-five going to meet a delicious little Dresden figure with blond hair and forget-me-not eyes in the garden of L'Église de la Trinité? He knows she will come, only he hopes not to be kept too long waiting, and at ten o'clock he is there for sure, walking up and down watching the nursemaids and the perambulators drawn up in the shade. On another occasion he might have looked at the nursemaids, but this day the prettiest is plain-featured; they are but the ordinary bread of existence; to-day he is going to partake of more extraordinary fare. He hopes so, at least, and the twenty years that have gone by have done nothing to obliterate the moment when he saw her walk across the gravelled space, a dainty little woman with blond hair, dressed in black, coming to her appointment. The dreamer sees her and her lover going together out of the garden. He follows them down the street, hearing them talking, trying to decide where they shall go to breakfast. To take her to a Parisian restaurant would be a common pleasure. He is bent on taking her to the country. Both want to sit on the warm grass and kiss each other peradventure. All souls dream of the country when they are in love; and she would hear him tell her that he loves her under the shade of trees. She is Chloe, and he is whomsoever was Chloe's lover. Whither are they going? Are they going to Bougeval? Many things may be said in its favour, but he has been there; and he has been to Meudon; he would go with her to some place where he has never been before, and where perchance he will never be again. Vincennes? The name is a pretty one, and it lures him. And they go there, arriving about eleven o'clock, a little early for breakfast. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, white clouds are unfolding--like gay pennants they seem to him. He is glad the sun is shining--all is omen, all is oracle, the clouds are the love pennants of the sky. What a chatter of thoughts and images are going on in his brain, perchance in hers, too! Moreover, there is her poem in his pocket--he must read it to her, and that she may hear it they sit upon the grass. Twenty years ago there was some rough grass facing the villas, and some trees and bushes, with here and there a bench for lovers to sit upon--for all kinds of people to sit upon, but lovers think that this world is made only for lovers. Only love is of serious account, and the object of all music and poetry, of pictures and sculpture, is to incite love, to praise love, to make love seem the only serious occupation. Vincennes, its trees and its white clouds lifting themselves in the blue sky, were regarded that day by these lovers as a very suitable setting for their gallantries. The dear little woman sits--the dreamer can see her on the warm grass--hidden as well as she can hide herself behind some bushes, the black crêpe dress hiding her feet or pretending to hide them. White stockings were the fashion; she wears white stockings, and how pretty and charming they look in the little black shoes! The younger generation now only knows black stockings; the charms of white are only known to the middle-aged. But the young man must read her his poem. He wants her to hear it because the poem pleases him, and because he feels that his poem will aid him to her affections. And when she asks him if he has thought of her during the night, he has to answer that her violet-scented handkerchief awoke him many times, that the wakings were delicious. What time did he go to bed? Very late; he had sat up writing a poem to her telling of the beauty of her blond hair. "Lady, unwreath thy hair, That is so long and fair. May flowers are not more sweet Than the shower of loosened hair That will fall around my feet. Lady, unwreath thy hair, That is so long and fair. "The golden curls they paint, Round the forehead of a saint, Ne'er glittered half so bright As thy enchanted hair, Full of shadow, full of light. Lady, unwreath thy hair, That is so long and fair. "Lady, unwreath thy hair, That is so long and fair, And weave a web of gold Of thy enchanted hair, Till all be in its hold. Lady, unwreath thy hair, That is so long and fair." "Do let me see your poem.... It is charming. But what do you mean by 'enchanted hair'? Is it that my hair has enchanted you? 'And weave a web of gold.'... 'Unwreath'--do you mean unloose my hair?" "Dames, tressez vos cheveux blonds Qui sont si lourds et si longs. "How well it goes with French!" "I don't understand French, but I like your poem in English. Do you know, I like it very much!" It is easy to obtain appreciation for poetry in such circumstances. Horace's best ode would not please a young woman as much as the mediocre verses of the young man she is in love with. It is well that it should be so, and this is the dreamer's criticism of life as he sits lost in shadow, lit up here and there by the blaze. He remembers the warmth of the grass and the scanty bushes; there was hardly sufficient cover that spring day for lovers in Vincennes, and he tries to remember if he put his hand on her white ankle while she was reading the poem. So far as he can remember he did, and she checked him and was rather cross, declaring just like the puss-cat that he must not do such things, that she would not have come out with him had she thought he was going to misbehave himself in that way. But she is not really angry with him. How can she be? Was it not he who wrote that her hair was enchanted? And what concern is it of hers that the phrase was borrowed from another poet? Her concern is that he should think her hair enchanted, and her hands go up to it. The young man prays to unloose it, to let it fall about her shoulders. He must be paid for his poem, and the only payment he will accept is to see her hair unwreathed. "But I cannot undo my hair on the common. Is there no other payment?" and she leans a little forward, her eyes fixed upon him. The dreamer can see her eyes, clear young eyes, but he cannot remember her mouth, how full the lips were or how thin; ah, but he remembers kissing her! On such a day a young man kisses his young woman, and it may be doubted if the young woman would ever go out with him again if he refrained, the circumstances being as I describe. But the lovers of Vincennes have to be careful. The lady with the enchanted hair has just spied a middle-aged gentleman with his two sons sitting on a bench at a little distance. "Do be quiet, I beg of you. I assure you, he saw us." "If he did it would matter little; he would remember his young days, before his children were born. Moreover, he looks kindly disposed." Later on the lovers address themselves to him, for time wears away even with lovers, and the desire of breakfast has come upon them both. The kindly disposed gentleman tells them the way to the restaurant. He insists even on walking part of the way with them, and they learn from him that the restaurant has only just been opened for the season; the season is not yet fairly begun, but no doubt they will be able to get something to eat, an omelette and a cutlet. Now the accomplished story-teller would look forward to this restaurant; already his thoughts would fix themselves on a _cabinet particulier_, and his fancy, if he were a naturalistic writer, would rejoice in recording the fact that the mirror was scrawled over with names of lovers, and he would select the ugliest names. But, dear reader, if you are expecting a _cabinet particulier_ in this story, and an amorous encounter to take place therein, turn the page at once--you will be disappointed if you do not; this story contains nothing that will shock your--shall I say your "prudish susceptibilities"? When the auburn-haired poet and the corn-coloured American lunched at Vincennes they chose a table by the window in the great long _salle_ lined with tables, and they were attended by an army of waiters weary of their leisure. There was a lake at Vincennes then, I am sure, with an island upon it and tall saplings, through which the morning sun was shining. The eyes of the lovers admired the scene, and they admired too the pretty reflections, and the swans moving about the island. The accomplished story-teller cries, "But if there is to be no scene in the restaurant, how is the story to finish?" Why should stories finish? And would a sensual _dénouement_ be a better end than, let us say, that the lovers are caught in a shower as they leave the restaurant? Such an accident might have happened: nothing is more likely than a shower at the end of April or the beginning of May, and I can imagine the lovers of Vincennes rushing into one of the _concierge's_ lodges at the gates of the villas. "For a few minutes," they say; "the rain will be over soon." But they are not long there when a servant appears carrying three umbrellas; she gives one to Marie, one to me; she keeps one for herself. "But who is she? You told me you knew no one at Vincennes." "No more I do." "But you must know the people who live here; the servant says that Monsieur (meaning her master) knows Monsieur (meaning you)." "I swear to you I don't know anybody here; but let's go--it will be rather fun." "But what shall we say in explanation? Shall we say we're cousins?" "Nobody believes in cousins; shall we say we're husband and wife?" The dreamer sees two figures; memory reflects them like a convex mirror, reducing them to a tenth their original size, but he sees them clearly, and he follows them through the rain up the steps of the villa to the _perron_--an explicit word that the English language lacks. The young man continues to protest that he never was at Vincennes before, that he knows no one living there, and they are both a little excited by the adventure. Who can be the owner of the house? A man of ordinary tastes, it would seem, and while waiting for their host the lovers examine the Turkey carpet, the richly upholstered sofas and chairs. A pretty little situation from which an accomplished story-teller could evolve some playful imaginings. The accomplished story-teller would see at once that _le bon bourgeois et sa dame_ and the children are learning English, and here is an occasion of practice for the whole family. The accomplished story-teller would see at once that the family must take a fancy to the young couple, and in his story the rain must continue to fall in torrents; these would prevent the lovers from returning to Paris. Why should they not stay to dinner? After dinner the accomplished story-teller would bring in a number of neighbours, and set them dancing and singing. What easier to suppose than that it was _la bourgeoise's_ evening at home? The young couple would sit in a distant corner oblivious to all but their own sweet selves. _Le bourgeois et sa dame_ would watch them with kindly interest, deeming it a kindness not to tell them that there were no trains after twelve; and when the lovers at last determined that they must depart, _le bourgeois_ and _la bourgeoise_ would tell them that their room was quite ready, that there was no possibility of returning to Paris that night. A pretty little situation that might with advantage be placed on the stage--on the French stage. A pretty, although a painful, dilemma for a young woman to find herself in, particularly when she is passionately in love with the young man. "Bitterly," the accomplished story-teller would say, "did the young widow regret the sacrifice to propriety she had made in allowing her young man to pass her off as his wife!" The accomplished story-teller would then assure his reader that the pretty American had acted precisely as a lady should act under the circumstances. But not being myself an accomplished story-teller, I will not attempt to say how a lady should act in such a situation, and it would be a fatuous thing for me to suggest that the lady was passionately in love. The situation that my fancy creates is ingenious; and I regret it did not happen. Nature spins her romances differently; and I feel sure that the lovers returned from Vincennes merely a little fluttered by their adventure. The reader would like to know if any appointment was made to meet again; if one was made it must have been for the next day or the next, for have we not imagined the young widow's passage already taken? Did she not tell that she was going back to America at the end of the week? He had said: "In a few days the Atlantic will be between us," and this fact had made them feel very sad, for the Atlantic is a big thing and cannot be ignored, particularly in love affairs. It would have been better for the poet if he had accepted the bourgeois' invitation to dinner; friends, as I suggested, might have come in, an impromptu dance might have been arranged, or the rain might have begun again; something would certainly have happened to make them miss the train; and they would have been asked to stay the night. The widow did not speak French, the young man did; he might have arranged it all with the _bourgeois et sa dame_, and the dear little widow might never have known her fate--O happy fate!--until the time came for them to go to their room. But he, foolish fellow, missed the chance the rain gave him, and all that came of this outing was a promise to come back next year, and to dance the Boston with him again; meanwhile he must wear her garter upon his arm. Did the suggestion that she should give him her garter come from her or from him? Was the garter given in the cab when they returned from Vincennes, or was it given the next time they met in Paris? To answer these questions would not help the story; suffice it to say that she said that the elastic would last a year, and when she took his arm and found it upon it she would know that he had been faithful to her. There was the little handkerchief which she had given him, and this he must keep in a drawer. Perhaps some of the scent would survive this long year of separation. I am sure that she charged him to write a letter to the steamer she had taken her passage in, and, careless fellow! instead of doing so he wrote verses, and the end of all this love affair, which began so well, was an angry letter bidding him good-bye for ever, saying he was not worthy because he had missed the post. All this happened twenty years ago; perhaps the earth is over her charming little personality, and it will be over me before long. Nothing endures; life is but change. What we call death is only change. Death and life always overlapping, mixed inextricably, and no meaning in anything, merely a stream of change in which things happen. Sometimes the happenings are pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, and in neither the pleasant nor the unpleasant can we detect any purpose. Twenty long years ago, and there is no hope, not a particle. * * * * * I have come to the end of my mood; an ache in my heart brings me to my feet, and looking round I cry out: "How dark is the room! Why is there no light? Bring in the lamp!" CHAPTER XII SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON Married folk always know, only the bachelor asks, "Where shall I dine? Shall I spend two shillings in a chop-house, or five in my club, or ten at the Café Royal?" For two or three more shillings one may sit on the balcony of the Savoy, facing the spectacle of evening darkening on the river, with lights of bridge and wharf and warehouse afloat in the tide. Married folk know their bedfellows; bachelors, and perhaps spinsters, are not so sure of theirs: this is a side issue which we will not pursue; an allusion to it will suffice to bring before the reader the radical difference between the lives of the married and the unmarried. O married ones, from breakfast to six, only, do our lives resemble yours! At that hour we begin to experience a sense of freedom and, I confess it, of loneliness. Perhaps life is essentially a lonely thing, and the married and the unmarried differ only in this, that we are lonely when we are by ourselves, and they are lonely when they are together. At half-past six the bachelor has to tidy up after the day's work, to put his picture away if he be a painter, to put his writings away if he be a writer, and then the very serious question arises, with whom shall he dine? His thoughts fly through Belgravia and Mayfair, and after whisking round Portman Square, and some other square in the northern neighbourhood, they soar and go away northward to Regent's Park, seeking out somebody living in one of those stately terraces who will ask him to stay to dinner. At So-and-So's there is always a round of beef and cold chicken-pie, whereas What-do-you-call-them's begin with soup. But really the food is not of much consequence; it is interesting company he seeks. It was last week that I realised, and for the first time, how different was the life of the married from the unmarried. The day was Sunday, and I had been writing all day, and in the hush that begins about six o'clock I remembered I had no dinner engagement that evening. The cup of tea I generally take about half-past four had enabled me to do another hour's work, but a little after six sentences refused to form themselves, a little dizziness began in the brain, and the question not only "Where shall I dine?" but "Where shall I pass the hour before dinner?" presented itself. The first thing to do was to dress, and while dressing I remembered that I had not wandered in St. James's Park for some time, and that that park since boyhood had fascinated me. St. James's Park and the Green Park have never been divided in my admiration of their beauty. The trees that grow along the Piccadilly railings are more beautiful in St. James's Park, or seem so, for the dells are well designed. The art of landscape-gardening is more akin to the art of a musician than to that of a painter; it is a sort of architecture with colour added. The formal landscape-gardening of Versailles reminds one of a tragedy by Racine, but the romantic modulations of the green hills along the Piccadilly areas are as enchanting as Haydn. There was a time when a boy used to walk from Brompton to Piccadilly to see, not the dells, but the women going home from the Argyle Rooms and the Alhambra, but after a slight hesitation he often crossed from the frequented to the silent side, to stand in admiration of the white rays of moonlight stealing between the trunks of the trees, allowing him to perceive the shapes of the hollows through the darkness. The trees grow so beautifully about these mounds, and upon the mounds, that it is easy to fill the interspaces with figures from Gainsborough's pictures, ladies in hoops and powdered hair, elegant gentlemen wearing buckled shoes, tail-coats, and the swords which made them gentlemen. Gainsborough did not make his gentlemen plead--that was his fault; but Watteau's ladies put their fans to their lips so archly, asking the pleading lover if he believes all he says, knowing well that his vows are only part of the gracious entertainment. But why did not the great designer of St. James's Park build little Greek temples--those pillared and domed temples which give such grace to English parks? Perhaps the great artist who laid out the Green Park was a moralist and a seer, and divining the stream of ladies that come up from Brompton to Piccadilly he thought--well, well, his thoughts were his own, and now the earth is over him, as Rossetti would say. Five-and-twenty years ago the white rays slanted between the tree-trunks, and the interspaces lengthened out, disappearing in illusive lights and shades, and, ascending the hill, the boy used to look over the empty plain, wondering at the lights of the Horse Guards shining far away like a village. Perhaps to-night, about midnight, I may find myself in Piccadilly again, for we change very little; what interested us in our youth interests us almost to the end. St. James's Park is perhaps more beautiful in the sunset--there is the lake, and, led by remembrance of some sunsets I had seen on it, I turned out of Victoria Street last Sunday, taking the eastern gate, my thoughts occupied with beautiful Nature, seeing in imagination the shapes of the trees designing themselves grandly against the sky, and the little life of the ponds--the ducks going hither and thither, every duck intent upon its own business and its own desire. I was extremely fortunate, for the effect of light in the Green Park was more beautiful last Sunday than anything I had ever seen; the branches of the tall plane trees hung over the greensward, the deciduous foliage hardly stirring in the pale sunshine, and my heart went out to the ceremonious and cynical garden, artificial as eighteenth-century couplets. Wild Nature repels me; and I thought how interesting it was to consider one's self, to ponder one's sympathies. Our antipathies are not quite so interesting to consider, but they are interesting, too, in a way, for they belong to one's self, and self is man's main business: all outside of self is uncertain; all comes from self, all returns to self. The reason I desired St. James's Park last Sunday was surely because it was part of me--not that part known to my friends; our friends understand only those margins of themselves which they discover in us. Never did I meet one who discovered for himself or herself that I loved trees better than flowers, or was deeply interested in the fact when attention was called to it.... I watch the trees and never weary of their swaying--solemnly silent and strangely green they are in the long, rainy days, excited when a breeze is blowing; in fine weather they gossip like frivolous girls! In their tremulous decline they are more beautiful than ever, far more beautiful than flowers. Now, I am telling myself, the very subconscious soul is speaking. And with what extraordinary loveliness did the long branches hang out of the tall, stately plane trees like plumes; in the hush of sound and decline of light the droop of the deciduous foliage spoke like a memory. I seemed to have known the park for centuries; yon glade I recognised as one that Watteau had painted. But in what picture? It is difficult to say, so easily do his pictures flow one into the other, always the same melancholy, the melancholy of festival, that pain in the heart, that yearning for the beyond which all suffer whose business in life is to wear painted or embroidered dresses, and to listen or to plead, with this for sole variation, that they who listen to-day will plead to-morrow. Watteau divined the sorrow of those who sit under colonnades always playing some part, great or small, in love's comedy, listening to the murmur of the fountain, watching a gentleman and lady advancing and bowing, bowing and retiring, dancing a pavane on a richly coloured carpet. Pierrot, the white, sensual animal, the eighteenth-century modification of the satyr, of the faun, plays a guitar; the pipe of Pan has been exchanged for a guitar. As the twilight gathered under the plane trees my vision became more mixed and morbid, and I hardly knew if the picture I saw was the picture in the Dulwich Gallery or the exquisite picture in the Louvre, "Une Assemblée dans la Parc." We all know that picture, the gallants and the ladies by the water-side, and the blue evening showing through the tall trees. The picture before me was like that picture, only the placing of the trees and the slope of the greensward did not admit of so extended a composition. A rough tree-trunk, from which a great branch had been broken or lopped off, stood out suddenly in very nineteenth-century naturalness, awaking the ghost of a picture which I recognised at once as Corot. Behind the tree a tender, evanescent sky, pure and transparent as the very heart of a flower, rose up, filling the park with romance, and as the sunset drooped upon the water, my soul said, "The Lake!" Ah, the pensive shadow that falls from the hills on either side of "The Lake," leaving the middle of the picture suffused with a long stream of light, narrowing as it approached the low horizon. But the line of the trees on the hither side of this London lake was heavier than the spiritual trees in the picture entitled "By the Water-side," and there was not anywhere the beauty of the broken birch that leans over the lake in "Le Lac de Garde." Then I thought of "The Ravine," for the darkening island reminded me of the hillside in the picture. But the St. James's Park sky lacked the refined concentration of light in "The Ravine," so beautifully placed, low down in the picture, behind some dark branches jutting from the right. The difference between Nature and Corot is as great as the difference between a true and a false Corot. Not that there is anything untrue in Nature, only Nature lacks humanity--self! Therefore not quite so interesting as a good Corot. So did I chatter to myself as I walked toward the bridge, that dear bridge, thrown straight as a plank across the lake, with numerous water-fowl collected there, a black swan driving the ducks about, snatching more than his due share of bread, and little children staring stolidly, afraid of the swan, and constantly reproved by their mothers for reasons which must always seem obscure to the bachelor. A little breeze was blowing, and the ducks bobbed like corks in the waves, keeping themselves in place with graceful side-strokes of their webbed feet. Sometimes the ducks rose from the water and flew round the trees by Queen Anne's Mansions, or they fled down the lake with outstretched necks like ducks on a Japanese fan, dropping at last into the water by the darkening island, leaving long silver lines, which the night instantly obliterated. An impression of passing away, of the effacement of individual life. One sighs, remembering that it is even so, that life passes, sunrise after sunrise, moonlight upon moonlight, evening upon evening, and we like May-flies on the surface of a stream, no more than they for all our poets and priests. The clock struck seven, reminding me of the dinner-hour, reminding me that I should have to dine alone that evening. To avoid dining alone I should not have lingered in St. James's Park, but if I had not lingered I should have missed an exquisite hour of meditation, and meditations are as necessary to me as absinthe to the absinthe-drinker. Only some little incident was wanting--a meeting with one whom one has not seen for a long time, a man or a woman, it would not matter which, a peg whereon to hang the description of the dusk among the trees, but I had met no friend in the Park. But one appeared on the threshold of St. James's Street. There I met a young man, a painter, one whose pictures interested me sometimes, and we went to a restaurant to talk art. "After dinner," I said, "we will get the best cigars and walk about the circus. Every Sunday night it is crowded; we shall see the women hurrying to and fro on love's quest. The warm night will bring them all out in white dresses, and a white dress in the moonlight is an enchantment. Don't you like the feather boas reaching almost to the ground? I do. Lights-o'-love going about their business interest me extraordinarily, for they and the tinkers and gipsies are the last that remain of the old world when outlawry was common. Now we are all socialists, more or less occupied with the performance of duties which obtain every one's approval. Methinks it is a relief to know that somebody lives out of society. I like all this London, this midnight London, when the round moon rises above the gracious line of Regent Street, and flaming Jupiter soars like a hawk, following some quest of his own. We on our little, he on his greater quest." * * * * * The night was hot and breathless, like a fume, and upon a great silken sky the circular and sonorous street circled like an amphitheatre.... I threw open my light overcoat, and, seizing the arm of my friend, I said: "He reminds me of a Turk lying amid houris. The gnawing, creeping sensualities of his phrase--his one phrase--how descriptive it is of the form and whiteness of a shoulder, the supple fulness of the arm's muscle, the brightness of eyes increased by kohl! Scent is burning on silver dishes, and through the fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe fruit and the falling sound thereof, comes the melancholy warble of a fountain. Or is it the sorrow of lilies rising through the languid air to the sky? The night is blue and breathless; the spasms of the lightning are intermittent among the minarets and the domes; the hot, fierce fever of the garden waxes in the almond scent of peaches and the white odalisques advancing, sleek oracles of mood.... He reminds me of the dark-eyed Bohemian who comes into a tavern silently, and, standing in a corner, plays long, wild, ravishing strains. I see him not, I hardly hear him; my thoughts are far away; my soul slumbers, desiring nothing. I care not to lift my head. Why should I break the spell of my meditations? But I feel that his dark eyes are fixed upon me, and little by little, in spite of my will, my senses awake; a strange germination is in progress within me; thoughts and desires that I dread, of whose existence in myself I was not aware, whose existence in myself I would fain deny, come swiftly and come slowly, and settle and absorb and become part of me.... Fear is upon me, but I may not pause; I am hurried on; repudiation is impossible, supplication and the wringing of hands are vain; God has abandoned me; my worst nature is uppermost. I see it floating up from the depths of my being, a viscous scum. But I can do nothing to check or control.... God has abandoned me.... I am the prey to that dark, sensual-eyed Bohemian and his abominable fiddle; and seizing my bank-notes, my gold and my silver, I throw him all I have. I bid him cease, and fall back exhausted. Give me "The Ring," give me "The Ring." Its cloud palaces, its sea-caves and forests, and the animality therein, its giants and dwarfs and sirens, its mankind and its godkind--surely it is nearer to life! Or go into the meadows with Beethoven, and listen to the lark and the blackbird! We are nearer life lying by a shady brook, hearing the quail in the meadows and the yellow-hammer in the thicket, than we are now, under this oppressive sky. This street is like Klinsor's garden; here, too, are flower-maidens--patchouli, jessamine, violet. Here is the languorous atmosphere of "Parsifal." Come, let us go; let us seek the country, the moon-haunted dells we shall see through Piccadilly railings. Have you ever stood in the dip of Piccadilly and watched the moonlight among the trees, and imagined a comedy by Wycherley acted there, a goodly company of gallants and fine ladies seated under the trees watching it? Every one has come there in painted sedan-chairs; the bearers are gathered together at a little distance." "My dear friend, you're talking so much that you don't see those who are passing us. That girl, she who has just turned to look back, favours heliotrope; it is delicious still upon the air; she is as pretty a girl as any that ever came in a sedan-chair to see a comedy by Wycherley. The comedy varies very little: it is always the same comedy, and it is always interesting. The circus in a sultry summer night under a full moon is very like Klinsor's garden. Come, if you be not _Parsifal_." CHAPTER XIII RESURGAM I was in London when my brother wrote telling me that mother was ill. She was not in any immediate danger, he said, but if a change for the worse were to take place, and it were necessary for me to come over, he would send a telegram. A few hours after a telegram was handed to me. It contained four words: "_Come at once.--Maurice._" "So mother is dying," I muttered to myself, and I stood at gaze, foreseeing myself taken into her room by a nurse and given a chair by the bedside, foreseeing a hand lying outside the bed which I should have to hold until I heard the death-rattle and saw her face become quiet for ever. This was my first vision, but in the midst of my packing, I remembered that mother might linger for days. The dear friend who lies in the church-yard under the downs lingered for weeks; every day her husband and her children saw her dying under their eyes: why should not this misfortune be mine? I know not to what God, but I prayed all night in the train, and on board the boat; I got into the train at the Broadstone praying. It is impossible, at least for me, to find words to express adequately the agony of mind I endured on that journey. Words can only hint at it, but I think that any one possessed of any experience of life, or who has any gift of imagination, will be able to guess at the terror that haunted me--terror of what?--not so much that my mother might die, nor hope that she might live, but just that I might arrive in time to see her die. In this confession I am afraid I shall seem hard and selfish to some; that will be because many people lack imagination, or the leisure to try to understand that there are not only many degrees of sensibility, but many kinds, and it is doubtful if any reader can say with truth any more than that my sensibility is not his or hers. It is my privilege to be sympathetic with ideas I do not share, and in certain moods I approach those who take a sad pleasure in last words, good-byes, and at looking on the dead. In my present mood it seems to me that it is not unlikely that my mother's last good-bye and her death appeared to me more awful in imagination than it would have ever done in reality. Indeed, there can be hardly any doubt that this is so, for we are only half-conscious of what is happening. Reality clouds, our actions mitigate, our perception; we can see clearly only when we look back or forwards. There is something very merciful about reality; if there were not, we should not be able to live at all. But to the journey. How shall I tell it? The third part must have been the most painful, so clearly do I remember it: the curious agony of mind caused by a sudden recognition of objects long forgotten--a tree or a bit of bog-land. The familiar country, evocative of a great part of my childhood, carried my thoughts hither and thither. My thoughts ranged like the swallows; the birds had no doubt just arrived, and in swift elliptical flights they hunted for gnats along the banks of the old weedy canal. That weedy canal along which the train travelled took my thoughts back to the very beginning of my life, when I stood at the carriage window and plagued my father and mother with questions regarding the life of the barges passing up and down. And it was the sudden awakenings from these memories that were so terrible--the sudden thrust of the thought that I was going westward to see my mother die, and that nothing could save her from death or me from seeing her die. Perhaps to find one's self suddenly deprived of all will is the greatest suffering of all. How many times did I say to myself, "Nothing can save me unless I get out at the next station," and I imagined myself taking a car and driving away through the country! But if I did such a thing I should be looked upon as a madman. "One is bound on a wheel," I muttered, and I began to think how men under sentence of death must often wonder why they were selected especially for such a fate, and the mystery, the riddle of it all, must be perhaps the greatest part of their pain. The morning was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and I used to catch myself thinking out a picturesque expression to describe it. It seemed to me that the earth might be compared to an egg, it looked so warm under the white sky, and the sky was as soft as the breast feathers of a dove. This sudden bow-wowing of the literary skeleton made me feel that I wanted to kick myself. Nature has forgotten to provide us with a third leg whereby we may revenge ourselves on instincts that we cannot control. A moment afterward I found myself plunged in reflections regarding the impossibility of keeping one's thoughts fixed on any one subject for any considerable length of time. At the end of these reflections I fell back, wondering, again asking if I were really destined to watch by my mother's death-bed. That day I seemed to become a sheer mentality, a sort of buzz of thought, and I could think of myself only as of a fly climbing a glass dome. It seemed to me that I was like a fly climbing and falling back, buzzing, and climbing again. "Never," I said to myself, "have I been more than a fly buzzing in a glass dome. And, good Lord, who made the glass dome?" How often did I ask myself that question, and why it was made, and if it were going to endure for ever! In such sore perplexity of mind questions from anybody would be intolerable, and I shrank back into the corner of the carriage whenever a passer-by reminded me, however vaguely, of anybody I had ever known; the mental strain increased mile after mile, for the names of the stations grew more familiar. I began to try to remember how many there were before we arrived at Claremorris, the station at which I was going to get out. Half an hour afterward the train slackened, the porter cried out "Ballyhaunis." The next would be Claremorris, and I watched every field, foreseeing the long road, myself on one side of the car, the driver on the other; a two hours' drive in silence or in talk--in talk, for I should have to tell him my errand.... He might be able to tell me about my mother, if the news of her illness had got as far as Claremorris. At the public-house where I went to get a car I made inquiries, but nothing was known. My mother must have fallen ill suddenly--of what? I had not heard she was ailing; I did not remember her ever to have been ill. At that moment some trees reminded me that we were close to Ballyglass, and my thoughts wandered away to the long road on the other side of the hill, and I saw there (for do we not often see things in memory as plainly as if they were before us?) the two cream-coloured ponies, Ivory and Primrose, she used to drive, and the phaeton, and myself in it, a little child in frocks, anxious, above all things, to see the mail-coach go by. A great sight it was to see it go by with mail-bags and luggage, the guard blowing a horn, the horses trotting splendidly, the lengthy reins swinging, and the driver, his head leaned a little on one side to save his hat from being blown away--he used to wear a grey beaver hat. The great event of that time was the day that we went to Ballyglass, not to see the coach go by, but to get into it, for in those days the railway stopped at Athenry. And that was the day I saw the canal, and heard with astonishment that there was a time long ago, no doubt in my father's youth, when people used to go to Dublin in a barge. Those memories were like a stupor, and awaking suddenly I saw that more than two and a half miles lay between me and my mother. In half an hour more I should know whether she were alive or dead, and I watched the horse trotting, interested in his shambling gait, or not at all interested in it--I do not know which. On occasions of great nervous tension one observes everything.... Everything I remembered best appeared with mechanical regularity; now it was a wood, a while afterward somebody's farmyard, later on a line of cottages, another wood, one of my own gate lodges. An old sawyer lived in it now--looking after it for me; and I hoped that the wheels of the car would not bring him out, for it would distress me to see him. The firs in the low-lying land had grown a little within the last thirty years, but not much. We came to the bridge; we left it behind us; the gate lodge and the drive from it; the plantation that I knew so well, the lilac bushes, the laburnums--good Heavens! How terrible was all this resurrection! Mists hide the mountains from us, the present hides the past; but there are times when the present does not exist at all, when every mist is cleared away, and the past confronts us in naked outline, and that perhaps is why it is so painful to me to return home. The little hill at the beginning of the drive is but a little hill, but to me it is much more, so intimately is it associated with all the pains and troubles of childhood. All this park was once a fairyland to me; now it is but a thin reality, a book which I have read, and the very thought of which bores me, so well do I know it. There is the lilac bush! I used to go there with my mother thirty years ago at this time of year, and we used to come home with our hands full of bloom. Two more turnings and we should be within sight of the house! This is how men feel when condemned to death. I am sure of it. At the last hill the driver allowed his horse to fall into a walk, but I begged of him to drive on the horse, for I saw some peasants about the steps of the hall door; they were waiting, no doubt, for news, or perhaps they had news. "We have bad news for you," they cried in the wailing tones of the West. "Not altogether bad news," I said to myself; "my mother is dead, but I have been saved the useless pain, the torture of spirit, I should have endured if I had arrived in time." China roses used to grow over the railings; very few blooms were left. I noticed just a few as I ran up the high steps, asking myself why I could not put the past behind me. If ever there was a time to live in the present this was one; but never was the present further from me and the past clearer than when I opened the hall door and stood in the hall paved with grey stones and painted grey and blue. Three generations had played there; in that corner I had learned to spin my first top, and I had kept on trying, showing a perseverance that amazed my father. He said, "If he will show as much perseverance in other things as he does in the spinning of a top, he will not fail." He used to catch me trying and trying to spin that top when he came downstairs on his way to the stables to see his beloved racehorses; that is the very chair on which he used to put his hat and gloves. In those days tall hats were worn in the country, and it was the business of his valet to keep them well brushed. How the little old man used to watch me, objecting in a way to my spinning my top in the hall, fearful lest I should overturn the chair on which the hat stood: sometimes that did happen, and then, oh dear! In search of some one I opened the drawing-room door. My sister was there, and I found her on a sofa weeping for our mother, who had died that morning. We are so constituted that we demand outward signs of our emotions, especially of grief; we are doubtful of its genuineness unless it is accompanied by sighs and tears; and that, I suppose, is why my sister's tears were welcomed by me, for, truth to tell, I was a little shocked at my own insensibility. This was stupid of me, for I knew through experience that we do not begin to suffer immediately after the accident; everything takes time, grief as well as pain. But in a moment so awful as the one I am describing one does not reflect; one falls back on the convention that grief and tears are inseparable as fire and smoke. If I could not weep it were well that my sister could, and I accepted her tears as a tribute paid to our mother's goodness--a goodness which never failed, for it was instinctive. It even seemed to me a pity that Nina had to dry her eyes so that she might tell me the sad facts--when mother died, of her illness, and the specialist that had not arrived in time. I learned that some one had blundered--not that that mattered much, for mother would not have submitted to an operation. While listening to her, I unwittingly remembered how we used to talk of the dear woman whose funeral I described in the pages entitled "A Remembrance." We used to talk, her daughters and her son and her husband and I, of her who was dying upstairs. We were greatly moved--I at least appreciated my love of her--yet our talk would drift from her suddenly, and we would speak of indifferent things, or maybe the butler would arrive to tell us lunch was ready. How these incidents jar our finer feelings! They seem to degrade life, and to such a point that we are ashamed of living, and are tempted to regard life itself as a disgrace. I foresaw that the same interruptions, the same devagations, would happen among ourselves in the square Georgian house standing on a hill-top overlooking a long winding lake, as had happened among my friends in the Italian house under the downs amid bunches of evergreen oaks. Nor had I to wait long for one of these unhappy devagations. My sister had to tell me who was staying in the house: an aunt was there, my mother's sister, and an uncle, my mother's brother, was coming over next day. It is easy to guess how the very mention of these names beguiled us from what should be the subject of our thought. And the room itself supplied plenty of distractions: all the old furniture, the colour of the walls, the very atmosphere of the room took my thought back to my childhood. The sofa on which my sister was sitting had been broken years ago, and I unwittingly remembered how it had been broken. It had been taken away to a lumber-room; somebody had had it mended. I began to wonder who had done this--mother, most likely; she looked after every thing. I have said that I had just arrived after a long journey. I had eaten nothing since the night before. My sister spoke of lunch and we went into the dining-room, and in the middle of the meal my brother came in looking so very solemn that I began to wonder if he had assumed the expression he thought appropriate to the occasion--I mean if he had involuntarily exaggerated the expression of grief he would naturally wear. We are so constituted that the true and the false overlap each other, and so subtly that no analysis can determine where one ends and the other begins. I remembered how the relatives and the friends on the day of the funeral in Sussex arrived, each one with a very grave face, perchance interrupting us in the middle of some trivial conversation; if so, we instantly became grave and talked of the dead woman sympathetically for a few minutes; then on the first opportunity, and with a feeling of relief, we began to talk of indifferent things; and with every fresh arrival the comedy was re-acted. Returning from the past to the present, I listened to my brother, who was speaking of the blunder that had been made: how a wrong doctor had come down owing to--the fault was laid upon somebody, no matter upon whom; the subject was a painful one and might well have been dropped, but he did not dare to talk of anything but our mother, and we all strove to carry on the conversation as long as possible. But my brother and I had not seen each other for years; he had come back from India after a long absence. Nor, I think, had I seen my sister since she was married, and that was a long while ago; she had had children; I had not seen her before in middle age. We were anxious to ask each other questions, to hear each other's news, and we were anxious to see the landscape that we had not seen, at least not together, for many years; and I remember how we were tempted out of the house by the soft sunlight floating on the lawn. The same gentle day full of mist and sunlight that I had watched since early morning had been prolonged, and the evening differed hardly from the morning; the exaltation in the air was a little more intense. My mother died certainly on the most beautiful day I had ever seen, the most winsome, the most white, the most wanton, as full of love as a girl in a lane who stops to gather a spray of hawthorn. How many times, like many another, did I wonder why death should have come to any one on such a bridal-like day. That we should expect Nature to prepare a decoration in accordance with our moods is part of the old savagery. Through reason we know that Nature cares for us not at all, that our sufferings concern her not in the least, but our instincts conform to the time when the sun stood still and angels were about. It was impossible for us not to wonder why the black shadow of death should have fallen across the white radiant day. I say "us," for my brother no doubt pondered the coincidence, though he did not speak his thoughts to me. No one dares to speak such thoughts; they are the foolish substance of ourselves which we try to conceal from others, forgetting that we are all alike. The day moved slowly from afternoon to evening, like a bride hidden within a white veil, her hands and her veil filled with white blossom; but a black bird, tiny like a humming-bird, had perched upon a bunch of blossom, and I seemed to lose sight of the day in the sinister black speck that had intruded itself upon it. No doubt I could think of something better were I to set my mind upon doing so, but that is how I thought the day I walked on the lawn with my brother, ashamed and yet compelled to talk of what our lives had been during the years that separated us. How could one be overpowered with grief amid so many distracting circumstances? Everything I saw was at once new and old. I had come among my brother and sister suddenly, not having seen them, as I have said, for many years; this was our first meeting since childhood, and we were assembled in the house where we had all been born. The ivy grown all over one side of the house, the disappearance of the laburnum, the gap in the woods--these things were new; but the lake that I had not seen since a little child I did not need to look at, so well did I know how every shore was bent, and the place of every island. My first adventures began on that long yellow strand; I did not need to turn my head to see it, for I knew that trees intervened and I knew the twisting path through the wood. That yellow strand speckled with tufts of rushes was my first playground. But when my brother proposed that we should walk there, I found some excuse; why go? The reality would destroy the dream. What reality could equal my memory of the firs where the rabbits burrowed, of the drain where we fished for minnows, of the long strand with the lake far away in summertime? How well I remember that yellow sand, hard and level in some places as the floor of a ball-room. The water there is so shallow that our governess used to allow us to wander at will, to run on ahead in pursuit of a sandpiper. The bird used to fly round with little cries; and we often used to think it was wounded; perhaps it pretended to be wounded in order to lead us away from its nest. We did not think it possible to see the lake in any new aspect, yet there it lay as we had never seen it before, so still, so soft, so grey, like a white muslin scarf flowing out, winding past island and headland. The silence was so intense that one thought of the fairy-books of long ago, of sleeping woods and haunted castles; there were the castles on islands lying in misted water, faint as dreams. Now and then a bird uttered a piercing little chatter from the branches of the tall larches, and ducks talked in the reeds, but their talk was only a soft murmur, hardly louder than the rustle of the reeds now in full leaf. Everything was spellbound that day; the shadows of reed and island seemed fixed for ever as in a magic mirror--a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, and, listening to the little gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle, one seemed to hear eternity murmuring its sad monotony. The lake curves inland, forming a pleasant bay among the woods; there is a sandy spit where some pines have found roothold, and they live on somehow despite the harsh sallies of the wind in winter. Along the shore dead reeds lie in rows three feet deep among the rushes; had they been placed there by hand they could not have been placed with more regularity; and there is an old cart-track, with hawthorns growing out of a tumbled wall. The hillside is planted--beautiful beeches and hollies at one end, and at the other some lawny interspaces with tall larches swaying tasselled branches shedding faint shadows. These were the wonder of my childhood. A path leads through the wood, and under the rugged pine somebody has placed a seat, a roughly hewn stone supported by two upright stones. For some reason unknown to me this seat always suggested, even when I was a child, a pilgrim's seat. I suppose the suggestion came from the knowledge that my grandmother used to go every day to the tomb at the end of the wood where her husband and sons lay, and whither she was taken herself long ago when I was in frocks; and twenty years after my father was taken there. What a ceaseless recurrence of the same things! A hearse will appear again in a few days, perhaps the same hearse, the horses covered up with black made to look ridiculous with voluminous weed, the coachman no better than a zany, the ominous superior mute directing the others with a wand; there will be a procession of relatives and friends, all wearing crepe and black gloves, and most of them thinking how soon they can get back to their business: that masquerade which we call a funeral! Fearing premature burial (a very common fear), my mother had asked that her burial should be postponed until a natural change in the elements of her body should leave no doubt that life no longer lingered there. And the interval between her death and her burial I spent along the lake's shore. The same weather continued day after day, and it is almost impossible to find words to express the beauty of the grey reflection of the islands and the reeds, and the faint evanescent shores floating away, disappearing in the sun-haze, and the silence about the shores, a kind of enchanted silence, interrupted, as I have said, only by the low gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle. Now and then the song of a bird would break out, and all was silence again.... "A silence that seems to come out of the very heart of things!" I said, and I stopped to listen, like one at the world's end; I walked on, wondering, through the rushes and tussocked grass and juniper bushes which grew along the wilding shore, along the edge of the wood. Coming from the town, I could not but admire the emptiness of the country; hardly ever did I hear the sound of a human voice or a footstep; only once did I meet some wood-gatherers, poor women carrying bundles of faggots, bent under their loads. And thinking that perchance I knew them--they were evidently from the village; if so, I must have known them when I was a boy--I was suddenly seized by an unaccountable dread or a shyness, occasioned no doubt by the sense of the immense difference that time had effected in us: they were the same, but I was different. The books I had pondered and the pictures I had seen had estranged me from them, simple souls that they were; and the consciousness of the injustice of the human lot made it a pain to me to look into their eyes. So I was glad to be able to pass behind some bushes, and to escape into the wood without their perceiving me. And coming upon pleasant interspaces, pleasanter even than those that lingered in my memory, I lay down, for, though the days were the first days of May, the grass was long and warm and ready for the scythe, the tasselled branches of the tall larches swung faintly in a delicious breeze, and the words of the old Irish poet came into my mind, "The wood was like a harp in the hands of a harper." To see the boughs, to listen to them, seemed a sufficient delight, and I began to admire the low sky full of cotton-like clouds, and the white flower that was beginning to light up the little leaves of the hedgerow, and I suppose it was the May-flower that drew down upon me a sudden thought of the beloved girl lost to me for ever. My mother's death had closed that wound a little, but in a moment all my grief reappeared, the wound gaped again, and it was impossible to stanch the bleeding. A man cannot lament two women at the same time, and only a month ago the most beautiful thing that had ever appeared in my life, an idea which I knew from the first I was destined to follow, had appeared to me, had stayed with me for a while, and had passed from me. All the partial loves of my youth seemed to find expression at last in a passion that would know no change. Who shall explain the mystery of love that time cannot change? Fate is the only word that conveys any idea of it, for of what use to say that her hair was blond and thick, that her eyes were grey and blue? I had known many women before her, and many had hair and eyes as fine and as deep as hers. But never one but she had had the indispensable quality of making me feel I was more intensely alive when she was by me than I was when she was away. It is that tingle of life that we are always seeking, and that perhaps we must lose in order to retain. On such a day, under the swaying branches of the larches, the whiteness of the lake curving so beautifully amid low shores could not fail to remind me of her body, and its mystery reminded me of her mystery; but the melancholy line of mountains rippling down the southern sky was not like her at all. One forgets what is unlike, caring only to dwell upon what is like.... Thinking of her my senses grow dizzy, a sort of madness creeps up behind the eyes. What an exquisite despair is this--that one shall never possess that beautiful personality again, sweet-scented as the May-time, that I shall never hold that dainty oval face in my hands again, shall look into those beautiful eyes no more, that all the intimacy of her person is now but a memory never to be renewed by actual presence--in these moments of passionate memory one experiences real grief, a pang that never has found expression perchance except in Niobe; even that concentration of features is more an expression of despair than grief. And it was the grief that this girl inspired that prevented me from mourning my mother as I should like to have mourned her, as she was worthy of being mourned, for she was a good woman, her virtues shone with more admirable light year after year; and had I lived with her, had I been with her during the last years of her life, her death would have come upon me with a sense of personal loss; I should have mourned her the day she died as I mourn her now, intimately; when I am alone in the evening, when the fire is sinking, the sweetness of her presence steals by me, and I realise what I lost in losing her. We do not grieve for the dead because they have been deprived of the pleasures of this life (if this life be a pleasure), but because of our own loss. But who would impugn such selfishness? It is the best thing we have, it is our very selves. Think of a mistress's shame if her lover were to tell her that he loved her because she wished to be beloved, because he thought it would give her pleasure to be loved--she would hate him for such altruism, and deem him unworthy of her. She would certainly think like this, and turn her face from him for a while until some desire of possession would send her back to him. We are always thinking of ourselves directly or indirectly. I was thinking of myself when shame prevented me from going to meet the poor wood-gatherers; they would not have thought at all of the injustice of having been left to the labour of the fields while I had gone forth to enjoy the world; they would have been interested to see me again, and a few kind words would have made their load seem easier on their backs. Called back by a sudden association of ideas, I began to consider that shameful injustice is undoubtedly a part of our human lot, for we may only grieve passionately for the casual, or what seems the merely casual; perhaps because the ultimate law is hidden from us; I am thinking now of her who comes suddenly into our lives tempting us with colour, fugitive as that of a flower, luring us with light as rapid as the light shed from the wings of a dove. Why, I asked myself, as I lay under the larches, are we to mourn transitory delight so intensely, why should it possess us more entirely than the sorrow that we experience for her who endured the labour of child-bearing, who nourished us perchance at her breast, whose devotion to us was unceasing, and who grew kindlier and more divorced from every thought of self as the years went by? From injustice there can be no escape, not a particle. At best we can, indeed we must, acquiesce in the fact that the only sorrow to be found in our hearts for aged persons is a sort of gentle sorrow, such as the year itself administers to our senses in autumn, when we come home with our hands full of the beautiful single dahlias that the Dutchmen loved and painted, bound up with sprays of reddening creepers; we come home along the sunny roads over which the yellow beeches lean so pathetically, and we are sad for the year, but we do not grieve passionately; our hearts do not break. Then again we cannot grieve as the conventions would have us grieve--in strange dress; the very fact of wearing crepe and black gloves alienates us from our real selves; we are no longer ourselves, we are mummers engaged in the performance of a masque. I could have mourned my mother better without crêpe. "There never has been invented anything so horrible as the modern funeral," I cried out. A picture of the hearse and the mutes rose up in my mind, and it was at that very moment that the song of the bird broke out again, and just above my head in the larches an ugly, shrilling song of about a dozen notes with an accent on the two last, a stupid, tiresome stave that never varied. "What bird can it be," I cried out, "that comes to interrupt my meditations?" and getting up I tried to discover it amid the branches of the tree under which I had been lying. It broke out again in another tree a little farther away, and again in another. I followed it, and it led me round the wood towards the hilltop to the foot of the steps, two short flights; the second flight, or part of it at least, has to be removed when the vault is opened. It consists, no doubt, of a single chamber with shelves along either side; curiosity leads few into vaults not more than a hundred years old; above the vault is the monument, a very simple one, a sort of table built in, and when my father was buried, a priest scrambled up or was lifted up by the crowd, and he delivered a funeral oration from the top of it. That day the box edgings were trampled under foot, and all the flowers in the beds. My mother, perhaps, cared little for flowers, or she did not live here sufficiently long to see that this garden was carefully tended; for years there were no children to come here for a walk, and it was thought sufficient to keep in repair the boundary wall so that cattle should not get in. No trees were cut here when the Woods were thinned, and the pines and the yews have grown so thickly that the place is overshadowed; and the sepulchral dark is never lifted even at midday. At the back of the tomb, in the wood behind it, the headstones of old graves show above the ground, though the earth has nearly claimed them; only a few inches show above the dead leaves; all this hillside must have been a graveyard once, hundreds of years ago, and this ancient graveyard has never been forgotten by me, principally on account of something that happened long ago when I was a little child. The mystery of the wood used to appeal to my curiosity, but I never dared to scramble over the low wall until one day, leaving my governess, who was praying by the tomb, I discovered a gap through which I could climb. My wanderings were suddenly brought to an end by the appearance, or the fancied appearance, of somebody in a brown dress--a woman I thought it must be; she seemed to float along the ground, and I hurried back, falling and hurting myself severely in my hurry to escape through the gap. So great was my fear that I spoke not of my hurt to my governess, but of the being I had seen, beseeching of her to come back; but she would not come back, and this fact impressed me greatly. I said to myself, "If she didn't believe somebody was there she'd come back." The fear endured for long afterwards; and I used to beg of her not to cross the open space between the last shift of the wood and the tomb itself. We can re-live in imagination an emotion already experienced. Everything I had felt when I was a child about the mysterious hollows in the beech wood behind the tomb and the old stone there, and the being I had seen clothed in a brown cloak, I could re-live again, but the wood enkindled no new emotion in me. Everything seemed very trivial. The steps leading to the tomb, the tomb itself, the boundary wall, and the enchanted wood was now no more than a mere ordinary plantation. There were a few old stones showing through the leaves, that is all. Marvels never cease; in youth one finds the exterior world marvellous, later on one finds one's inner life extraordinary, and what seemed marvellous to me now was that I should have changed so much. The seeing of the ghost might be put down to my fancy, but how explain the change in the wood--was its mystery also a dream, an imagination? Which is the truth--that experience robs the earth of its mystery, or that we have changed so that the evanescent emanations which we used suddenly to grow aware of, and which sometimes used to take shape, are still there, only our eyes are no longer capable of perceiving them? May not this be so?--for as one sense develops, another declines. The mystic who lives on the hillside in the edge of a cave, pondering eternal rather than ephemeral things, obtains glimpses, just as the child does, of a life outside this life of ours. Or do we think these things because man will not consent to die like a plant? Wondering if a glimpse of another life had once been vouchsafed to me when my senses were more finely wrought, I descended the hillside; the bird, probably a chaffinch, repeated its cry without any variation. I went down the hillside and lay in the shadow of the tasselled larches, trying to convince myself that I had not hoped to see the brown lady, if it were a lady I had seen, bending over the stones of the old burial-ground. One day the silence of the woods was broken by the sound of a mason's hammer, and on making inquiry from a passing workman--his hodman probably--I learned that on opening the vault it had been discovered that there was not room for another coffin. But no enlargement of the vault was necessary; a couple of more shelves was all that would be wanted for many a year to come. His meaning was not to be mistaken--when two more shelves had been added there would be room for my brothers, myself, and my sister, but the next generation would have to order that a further excavation be made in the hill or look out for a new burial-ground. He stood looking at me, and I watched for a moment a fine young man whose eyes were pale as the landscape, and I wondered if he expected me to say that I was glad that things had turned out very well.... The sound of the mason's hammer got upon my nerves, and feeling the wood to be no longer a place for meditation, I wandered round the shore as far as the old boat-house, wondering how it was that the words of a simple peasant could have succeeded in producing such a strange revulsion of feeling in me. No doubt it was the intensity with which I realised the fact that we are never far from death, none of us, that made it seem as if I were thinking on this subject for the first time. As soon as we reach the age of reflection the thought of death is never long out of our minds. It is a subject on which we are always thinking. We go to bed thinking that another day has gone, that we are another day nearer our graves. Any incident suffices to remind us of death. That very morning I had seen two old blue-bottles huddled together in the corner of a pane, and at once remembered that a term of life is set out for all things--a few months for the blue-bottle, a few years for me. One forgets how one thought twenty years ago, but I am prone to think that even the young meditate very often upon death; it must be so, for all their books contain verses on the mutability of things, and as we advance in years it would seem that we think more and more on this one subject, for what is all modern literature but a reek of regret that we are but bubbles on a stream? I thought that nothing that could be said on this old subject could move me, but that boy from Derryanny had brought home to me the thought that follows us from youth to age better than literature could have done; he had exceeded all the poets, not by any single phrase--it was more his attitude of mind towards death (towards my death) that had startled me--and as I walked along the shore I tried to remember his words. They were simple enough, no doubt, so simple that I could not remember them, only that he had reminded me that Michael Malia, that was the mason's name, had known me since I was a little boy; I do not know how he got it out; I should not have been able to express the idea myself, but without choosing his words, without being aware of them, speaking unconsciously, just as he breathed, he had told me that if my heart were set on any particular place I had only to tell Michael Malia and he would keep it for me; there would be a convenient place for me just above my grandfather when they had got the new shelf up; he had heard we were both writers. That country boy took it out of me as perhaps no poet had ever done! I shall never forget him as I saw him going away stolidly through the green wood, his bag of lime on his back. And sitting down in front of the tranquil lake I said, "In twenty or thirty years I shall certainly join the others in that horrible vault; nothing can save me," and again the present slipped away from me and my mind became again clear as glass; the present is only subconscious; were it not so we could not live. I have said all this before; again I seemed to myself like a fly crawling up a pane of glass, falling back, buzzing, and crawling again. Every expedient that I explored proved illusory, every one led to the same conclusion that the dead are powerless. "The living do with us what they like," I muttered, and I thought of all my Catholic relations, every one of whom believes in the intervention of priests and holy water, the Immaculate Conception, the Pope's Indulgences, and a host of other things which I could not remember, so great was my anguish of mind at the thought that my poor pagan body should be delivered helpless into their pious hands. I remembered their faces, I could hear their voices--that of my dear brother, whom I shall always think of as a strayed cardinal rather than as a colonel; I could see his pale eyes moist with faith in the intercession of the Virgin--one can always tell a Catholic at sight, just as one can tell a consumptive. The curving lake, the pale mountains, the low shores, the sunlight, and the haze contributed not a little to frighten me; the country looked intensely Catholic at that moment. My thoughts swerved, and I began to wonder if the face of a country takes its character from the ideas of those living in it. "How shall I escape from that vault?" I cried out suddenly. Michael Malia's hodman had said that they might place me just above my grandfather, and my grandfather was a man of letters, a historian whose histories I had not read; and in the midst of the horror my probable burial inspired in me, I found some amusement in the admission that I should like the old gentleman whose portrait hung in the dining-room to have read my novels. This being so, it was not improbable that he would like me to read his histories, and I began to speculate on what the author of a history of the French Revolution[1] would think of "Esther Waters." The colour of the chocolate coat he wears in his picture fixed itself in my mind's eye, and I began to compare it with the colour of the brown garment worn by the ghost I had seen in the wood. Good Heavens, if it were his ghost I had seen! [Footnote 1: Still unpublished.] And listening to the lapping of the lake water I imagined a horrible colloquy in that vault. It all came into my mind, his dialogue and my dialogue. "Great God," I cried out, "something must be done to escape!" and my eyes were strained out on the lake, upon the island on which a Welshman had built a castle. I saw all the woods reaching down to the water's edge, and the woods I did not see I remembered; all the larch trees that grew on the hillsides came into my mind suddenly, and I thought what a splendid pyre might be built out of them. No trees had been cut for the last thirty years; I might live for another thirty. What splendid timber there would then be to build a pyre for me!--a pyre fifty feet high, saturated with scented oils, and me lying on the top of it with all my books (they would make a nice pillow for my head). The ancient heroes used to be laid with their arms beside them; their horses were slaughtered so that their spirits might be free to serve them in the aerial kingdoms they had gone to inhabit. My pyre should be built on the island facing me; its flames would be seen for miles and miles; the lake would be lighted up by it, and my body would become a sort of beacon-fire--the beacon of the pagan future awaiting old Ireland! Nor would the price of such a funeral be anything too excessive--a few hundred pounds perhaps, the price of a thousand larches and a few barrels of scented oil and the great feast: for while I was roasting, my mourners should eat roast meat and drink wine and wear gay dresses--the men as well as the women; and the gayest music would be played. The "Marriage of Figaro" and some Offenbach would be pleasing to my spirit, the ride of the Valkyrie would be an appropriate piece; but I am improvising a selection, and that is a thing that requires careful consideration. It would be a fine thing indeed if such a funeral--I hate the word--such a burning as this could be undertaken, and there is no reason why it should not be, unless the law interdicts public burnings of human bodies. And then my face clouded, and my soul too; I grew melancholy as the lake, as the southern mountains that rippled down the sky plaintive as an Irish melody, for the burning I had dreamed of so splendidly might never take place. I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium in England--in Ireland there is no Crematorium; Ireland lingers in the belief in the resurrection of the body. "Before I decide," I said to myself, "what my own funeral shall be, I must find out what funeral liberties the modern law and Christian morality permit the citizen," and this I should not be able to discover until I returned to Dublin. It was by the side of dulcet Lough Cara that I began to imagine my interview with the old family solicitor, prejudiced and white-headed as the king in a certain kind of romantic play, a devout Catholic who would certainly understand very little of my paganism; but I should catch him on two well-sharpened horns--whether he should be guilty of so unbusiness-like an act as to refuse to make a will for theological reasons, or to do a violence to his conscience by assisting a fellow-creature to dispose of his body in a way that would give the Almighty much trouble to bring about the resurrection of the body in the valley of Jehoshaphat. The embarrassment of the family solicitor would be amusing, and if he declined to draw up my will for me there would be plenty of other solicitors who would not hesitate to draw up whatever will I was minded to make. In order to secure the burial of my body, my notion was to leave all my property, lands, money, pictures, and furniture to my brother, Colonel Maurice Moore on the condition that I should be burnt and the ashes disposed of without the humiliation of Christian rites; that if the conditions that the inheritance carried with it were so disagreeable to Colonel Maurice Moore that he could not bring himself to see that the disposal of my remains was carried out according to my wishes, my property, lands, money, pictures, and furniture, should go to my brother Augustus Moore; that in the event of his declining to carry out my wishes regarding the disposal of my remains, all my property should go to my brother Julian Moore; that if he should refuse to carry out my wishes regarding the disposal of my remains, all the said property should go to my friend Sir William Eden, who would, I felt sure, take a sad pleasure in giving effect to the wishes of his old friend. A will drawn up on these lines would secure me against all chance of being buried with my ancestors in Kiltoon, and during the next two days I pondered my own burning. My brother might think that he was put to a good deal of expense, but he would not fail me. He had taken off my hands the disagreeable task of seeing the undertakers and making arrangements for the saying of Masses, etc., arrangements which would be intensely disagreeable to me to make so. I had plenty of time to think out the details of my burning; and I grew happy in the thought that I had escaped from the disgrace of Christian burial--a disgrace which was never, until the last two days, wholly realised by me, but which was nevertheless always suspected. No doubt it was the dread of Kiltoon that had inspired that thought of death from which in late years I had never seemed able to escape. I am of the romantic temperament, and it would be a pity to forgo the burning I had imagined. I delighted in the vision that had come upon me of the felling of the larch trees on the hillside and the building of the pyre about the old castle. It would reach much higher; I imagined it at least fifty feet high. I saw it flaming in imagination, and when half of it was burnt, the mourners would have to take to the boats, so intense would be the heat. What a splendid spectacle! Never did any man imagine a more splendid funeral! It would be a pity if the law obliged me to forgo it. But there was no use hoping that the law would not; there was a law against the burning of human remains, and I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium: it only remained for me to decide what I would wish to be done with the ashes. In a moment of happy inspiration I conceived the idea of a Greek vase as the only suitable repository for my ashes, and I began to remember all the Greek vases I had seen: all are beautiful, even the Roman Greek; these are sometimes clumsy and heavy, but the sculpture is finely designed and executed. Any Greek vase I decided would satisfy me, provided, of course, that the relief represented Bacchanals dancing, and nearly every Greek vase is decorated in this way. The purchase of the vase would be an additional expense; no doubt I was running my brother in for a good deal of money; it is becoming more and more difficult to buy original Greek sculpture! and in a moment of posthumous parsimony my thoughts turned to a copy of a Greek vase in granite, granite being more durable than marble, and I wanted the vase to last for a long time. It was delightful to take a sheet of paper and a pencil and to draw all that I remembered of the different vases I had seen, different riots of lusty men carrying horns of wine, intermingled with graceful girls dancing gracefully, youths playing on pipes, and amidst them fauns, the lovely animality of the woods, of the landscape ages, when men first began to milk their goats, and when one man out of the tribe, more pensive, more meditative than the others, went down to the river's bank and cut a reed and found music within it. The vase I remembered best has upright handles springing from the necks of swans. It stands about two feet high, perhaps a little more, and its cavity should be capable of containing all that remains of me after my burning. None would have thought, from the happy smile upon my lips, that I was thinking of a Grecian urn and a little pile of white ashes. "O death, where is thy sting?" I murmured, and the pencil dropped from my hand, for my memory was more beautiful than anything I could realise upon paper. I could only remember one side of a youth, that side of him next to an impulsive maiden; her delight gives her wings; his left arm is about her shoulder. She is more impulsive than he, and I wondered at his wistfulness--whether he was thinking of another love or a volume of poems that he loved better. Little by little many of the figures in the dance were remembered, for the sculpture was so well done that the years had only clouded my memory. The clouds dispersed, and I saw this time one whole figure, that of a dancing-girl; her right arm is extended, her left arm is bent, she holds a scarf as she dances, and the muscles of the arms are placed so well, and the breasts too, that one thinks that the girl must have been before the sculptor as he worked. Ingres and Antiquity alone knew how to simplify. There is little, but that little is so correct that detail is unnecessary, and I exulted in remembrance of the dainty design of the belly, half hidden, half revealed by little liquid folds. "How exquisite," I said, "is that thigh! how well it advances! And we poor moderns have lived upon that beauty now well-nigh two thousand years? But how vainly we have attempted to imitate that drapery flowing about the ankles, like foam breaking on the crest of a wave." A slender youth stands next; his shoulders are raised, for the pipes are to his lips, his feet are drawn close together, and by him a satyr dances wildly, clashing cymbals as he dances. He is followed, I think--it is difficult to say whether this be a recollection of another vase or whether the figure is included in the same group--by a faun tempting the teeth and claws of a panther with a bunch of grapes. And it was this winsome faun that decided me to select this vase as the repository of my ashes. And I determined to stipulate in my will that this vase be chosen. But my will must not be too complicated, otherwise it might be contested. All that is not common can easily be argued to be madness by a loquacious lawyer before a stupid jury. Who except a madman, asks the lawyer, would trouble to this extent as to what shall be done with his remains? Everybody in the court agrees with him, for every one in court is anxious to prove to his neighbour that he is a good Christian. Everything is convention, and lead coffins and oak coffins cannot be held as proof of insanity, because men believe still in the resurrection of the body. Were the Pharaohs insane? Was the building of the Great Pyramid an act of madness? The common assurance is that it matters nothing at all what becomes of our remains, yet the world has always been engaged in setting up tombs. It is only those pretty satyrs who do not think of tombs. Satyrs wander away into some hidden place when they feel death upon them. But poor humanity desires to be remembered. The desire to be remembered for at least some little while after death is as deep an instinct as any that might be readily named, and our lives are applied to securing some little immortality for ourselves. What more natural than that every one should desire his death and burial to be, as it were, typical of the ideas which he agreed to accept during life: what other purpose is served by the consecration of plots of ground and the erection of crosses? In this at least I am not different from other people; if I am anxious about my burning, it is because I would to the last manifest and express my ideas, and neither in my prose nor verse have I ever traced out my thoughts as completely or as perfectly as I have done in this order for my tomb. One trouble, however, still remained upon my mind. Where should the vase be placed? Not in Westminster Abbey. Fie upon all places of Christian burial! A museum inspires lofty thoughts in a few; Gouncourt speaks of the icy admiration of crowds. The vase might stand in the stone wall, and in the very corner where I learned to spin my top? But sooner or later a housemaid would break it. The house itself will become the property of another family, and the stranger will look upon the vase with idle curiosity, or perhaps think it depressing to have me in the hall. An order for my removal to a garret might be made out. The disposal of the vase caused me a great deal of anxiety, and I foresaw that unless I hit upon some idea whereby I could safeguard it from injury for ever, my project would be deprived of half its value. As I sat thinking I heard a noise of feet suddenly on the staircase. "They are bringing down my mother's coffin," I said, and at that moment the door was opened and I was told that the funeral procession was waiting for me. My brother, and various relatives and friends, were waiting in the hall; black gloves were on every hand, crepe streamed from every hat, "All the paraphernalia of grief," I muttered; "nothing is wanting." My soul revolted against this mockery. "But why should I pity my mother? She wished to lie beside her husband. And far be it from me to criticise such a desire!" The coffin was lifted upon the hearse. A gardener of old time came up to ask me if I wished there to be any crying. I did not at first understand what he meant; he began to explain, and I began to understand that he meant the cries with which the Western peasant follows his dead to the grave. Horrible savagery! and I ordered that there was to be no keening; but three or four women, unable to contain themselves, rushed forward and began a keen. It was difficult to try to stop them. I fancy that every one looked round to see if there were any clouds in the sky, for it was about a mile and a half to the chapel; we would have to walk three miles at least, and if it rained, we should probably catch heavy colds. We thought of the damp of the wood, and the drip from the melancholy boughs of yew and fir growing about that sepulchre on the hillside. But there was no danger of rain; Castle Island lay in the misted water, faint and grey, reminding me of what a splendid burial I might have if the law did not intervene to prevent me. And as we followed the straggling grey Irish road, with scant meagre fields on either side--fields that seemed to be on the point of drifting into marsh land--past the houses of the poor people, I tried to devise a scheme for the safeguarding of the vase. But Rameses the Second had not succeeded in securing his body against violation; it had been unswathed; I had seen his photograph in the Strand, and where he failed, how should I succeed? Twenty priests had been engaged to sing a Mass, and whilst they chanted, my mind continued to roam, seeking the unattainable, seeking that which Rameses had been unable to find. Unexpectedly, at the very moment when the priest began to intone the Pater Noster, I thought of the deep sea as the only clean and holy receptacle for the vase containing my ashes. If it were dropped where the sea is deepest it would not reach the bottom, but would hang suspended in dark, moveless depths where only a few fishes range, in a cool, deep grave "made without hands, in a world without stain," surrounded by a lovely revel of Bacchanals, youths and maidens, and wild creatures from the woods, man in his primitive animality. But nothing lasts for ever. In some millions of years the sea will begin to wither, and the vase containing me will sink (my hope is that it will sink down to some secure foundation of rocks to stand in the airless and waterless desert that the earth will then be). Rameses failed, but I shall succeed. Surrounded by dancing youths and maidens, my tomb shall stand on a high rock in the solitude of the extinct sea of an extinct planet. Millions of years will pass away, and the earth, after having lain dead for a long winter, as it does now for a few weeks under frost and snow, will, with all other revolving planets, become absorbed in the sun, and the sun itself will become absorbed in greater suns, Sirius and his like. In the matters of grave moment, millions of years are but seconds; billions convey very little to our minds. At the end of, let us say, some billion years the ultimate moment towards which everything from the beginning has been moving will be reached; and from that moment the tide will begin to flow out again, the eternal dispersal of things will begin again; suns will be scattered abroad, and in tremendous sun-quakes planets will be thrown off; in loud earth-quakes these planets will throw off moons. Millions of years will pass away, the earth will become cool, and out of the primal mud life will begin again in the shape of plants, and then of fish, and then of animals. It is like madness, but is it madder than Christian doctrine? and I believe that billions of years hence, billions and billions of years hence, I shall be sitting in the same room as I sit now, writing the same lines as I am now writing: I believe that again, a few years later, my ashes will swing in the moveless and silent depths of the Pacific Ocean, and that the same figures, the same nymphs, and the same fauns will dance around me again. 
51426	----	American Men of Letters HENRY D. THOREAU [Illustration: Henry D. Thoreau.] American Men of Letters. HENRY D. THOREAU. BY F. B. SANBORN. _REVISED EDITION._ [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge Copyright, 1882, BY F. B. SANBORN. _All rights reserved._ Much do they wrong our Henry wise and kind, Morose who name thee, cynical to men, Forsaking manners civil and refined To build thyself in Walden woods a den,-- Then flout society, flatter the rude hind. We better knew thee, loyal citizen! Thou, friendship's all-adventuring pioneer, Civility itself wouldst civilize: Whilst braggart boors, wavering 'twixt rage and fear, Slave hearths lay waste, and Indian huts surprise, And swift the Martyr's gibbet would uprear: Thou hail'dst him great whose valorous emprise Orion's blazing belt dimmed in the sky,-- Then bowed thy unrepining head to die. A. BRONSON ALCOTT CONCORD, _January, 1882_. PREFACE When, in 1879, I was asked by my friend Charles Dudley Warner to write the biography of Thoreau which follows, I was by no means unprepared. I had known this man of genius for the last seven years of his too short life; had lived in his family, and in the house of his neighbor across the way, Ellery Channing, his most intimate friend outside of that family; and had assisted Channing in the preparation and publication of his "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,"--the first full biography which appeared. Not very long after Thoreau's death Channing had written me these sentences, with that insight of the future which he often displayed: "That justice can be done to our deceased brother by me, of course I do not think. But to you and to me is intrusted the care of his immediate fame. I feel that my part is not yet done, and cannot be without your aid. My little sketch must only serve as a note and advertisement that such a man lived,--that he did brave work, which must yet be given to the world. In the midst of all the cold and selfish men who knew this brave and devoted scholar and genius, why should not you be called on to make some sacrifices, even if it be to publish my sketch?" This I was ready to do in 1864; and it was through my means that the volume, then much enlarged by Channing, was published in 1873, and again, with additions and corrections, in 1902. I had also the great advantage of hearing from the mother and sister of Henry the affectionate side of his domestic life,--which indeed I had witnessed, both in his health and in his long mortal illness. From Emerson, who had a clear view of Thoreau's intellect and his moral nature, I derived many useful suggestions, though not wholly agreeing with him in some of his opinions. In March, 1878, after hearing Emerson read a few unpublished notes on Thoreau, made years before, I called on him one evening, and thus entered the event in my journal:-- "I was shown several of Thoreau's early papers; one a commentary on Emerson's 'Sphinx,' and another from his own translation of 'The Seven Against Thebes,' written at William Emerson's house on Staten Island in 1843. Of this episode in Thoreau's life (his tutorship for six months of William Emerson's three sons), Emerson told me that his brother and Henry were not men that could get along together: 'each would think whatever the other did was out of place.' This was said to imply that Thoreau's poem 'The Departure' could not have been written on his leaving Castleton in Staten Island. I had shown Emerson these verses (first printed by me, at Sophia Thoreau's wish, in the Boston 'Commonwealth' of 1863), whereupon he said:-- "I think Thoreau had always looked forward to authorship as his work in life, and finding that he could write prose well, he soon gave up writing verse, in which he was not willing to be patient enough to make the lines smooth and flowing. These verses are smoother than he usually wrote; but I have now no recollection of seeing them before, nor of any circumstances in which they may have been written.' Alluding to Judge Hoar's marked dislike of Thoreau, Emerson said, 'There was no _bow_ in Henry; he never sought to please his hearers or his friends.' Thomas Cholmondeley, the nephew of Scott's friend Richard Heber, meeting Henry at dinner at Emerson's, to whom Cholmondeley had letters in 1854, and expressing to his host the wish to see more of him, Emerson said he told the Englishman, 'If you wish to see Thoreau, go and board at his mother's house; she will be glad to take you in, and there you can meet him every day. He did so,' added Emerson, 'and you know the result.' ... This led to further mention of Mrs. Thoreau, who, Emerson said, 'was a person of sharp and malicious wit,' of whose sayings he read me some instances from his Journals. Among these was her remark to Mrs. Emerson, 'Henry is very _tolerant_'; adding 'Mr. Emerson has been talking so much with Henry that he has learnt Henry's way of thinking and talking.' Emerson went on to me:-- "'I had known Henry slightly when in college; the scholarship from which he drew an income while there (a farm at Pullen Point in Chelsea) was the one that I and my brothers, William and Edward, had enjoyed while we were at college. But my first intimate acquaintance with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, my wife's sister, who then boarded with the Thoreau family in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands, used to bring me his verses (the "Sic Vita" and others), and tell me of his entries in his Journal. Here is the Index to my Journals, in which Thoreau's name appears perhaps fifty times, perhaps more.'" Thus far my Journal of 1878. I was myself introduced to Thoreau by Emerson, March 28, 1855, in the Concord Town Hall, one evening, just before a lecture there by Emerson. From that time until Henry's death, May 6, 1862, I saw him every few days, unless he or I was away from Concord, and for more than two years I dined with him daily at his mother's table, in the house opposite to Ellery Channing's. I thus came to know all the surviving members of his kindred,--his eccentric uncle, Charles Dunbar, his two aunts on each side, Jane and Maria Thoreau, and Louisa and Sophia Dunbar (both older than Mrs. Thoreau), and the descendants in Maine of his aunt Mrs. Billings, long since dead. His sister Helen and his brother John I never knew, but learned much about them from their mother and sister; for neither Henry nor his father often spoke of them. Sophia also placed in my hands after Henry's death several of his poems, which I printed in the "Commonwealth," and Emerson gave me other manuscripts of Thoreau which had lodged with him while he was editing the "Dial." He had urged Sophia to leave all the MSS. with me, but her pique against Channing at the time prevented this,--she knowing him to be intimate with me. With all this preparation, I received from Mr. Blake, to whom Sophia had bequeathed them in 1876, the correspondence of Thoreau and his college essays, with some other papers of Henry's and his own, but without the replies from the family to Henry's affectionate letters. Even his own to his mother and sisters had been withheld from publication by Emerson in 1865, when a small collection of Thoreau's Letters and Poems was edited by Emerson. This omission Sophia regretted, as she told me; and finding them now in my hands, though I made use of their contents in writing the biography, I withheld them from full publication, foreseeing that I should probably have occasion to edit the letters in full at some later time; and I made but sparing use of the early essays. On the other hand, I perceived that the character and genius of Thoreau could not be well understood unless some knowledge was had of the Concord farmers, scholars, and citizens, among whom he had spent his days, and who have furnished a background for that scene of authorship which the small town of Concord has presented for now more than seventy years. Therefore, having access to the records and biographies of the Concord "Social Circle," then in preparation for the public, and to many other records of the past in New England, I sketched therefrom the character of our interesting community, which gave color and tone to the outlines of this thoughtful scholar's career. But I held back for the "Familiar Letters" the more intimate details of Thoreau's self-devoted life, and did not draw heavily on the thirty-odd volumes of the Journals, to which, at Worcester, Mr. Blake gave me free access. It was then his purpose to bring out these Journals much earlier and more fully than was done, until Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published their admirable edition in fourteen volumes, a few years ago, after Mr. Blake's death. The success of my biography, written under these limitations, has more than justified reasonable expectations. It was popular from the first, and is still widely read, and called for by a generation of readers quite distinct from those for whom it was originally written. Since the spring of 1882, when it was published, many details of Thoreau's life and that of his ancestors have become known by an examination of his copious manuscripts, of the papers of his Loyalist ancestors, and his father's relatives in the island of Jersey; and by the publication of some twenty-five volumes from Thoreau's own hand. He never employed an amanuensis, and he seems to have carefully preserved the large mass of his manuscripts which accumulated during his literary life of some twenty-five years. The exceptions to this remark were the copies of his earlier verses, which he told me, in his last illness, he had destroyed, because they did not meet Emerson's approval, and those pages of his Journals which he had issued in printed books or magazine articles. Fragments of his youthful verses were kept, however, by some of his family, and still exist. From all these sources many things have come to light concerning his ancestry and the minor events of his life, which I hope eventually to give the world in a final biography that will serve as a sequel to this one. The greatly enhanced reputation which Thoreau now enjoys, as compared with his fame in 1882, seems to warrant a detail which was not then needful, and which even the "Familiar Letters" does not furnish. Much misconception of his character and the facts of his life still prevails; and singular statements have been made in text-books, as to his origin and training. One authority described Thoreau as descended from "farmer folk" in Connecticut, who were recent immigrants from France. So far as I know, not a single ancestor of his ever dwelt in Connecticut; they were all merchants; and though his Thoreau ancestors spoke French, or a patois of it, in Jersey, there is no evidence that any of them had lived in France for more than five centuries. This initial authentic biography, with its few errors corrected, now comes forth in a new edition, which will long be found useful, in the manner indicated, and I hope, may be received as the earlier edition has been, with all the favor which its modest aim deserves. F. B. S. Concord, Mass., October 8, 1909. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Page Birth and Family 1 CHAPTER II. Childhood and Youth 32 CHAPTER III. Concord and its Famous People 63 CHAPTER IV. The Embattled Farmers 97 CHAPTER V. The Transcendental Period 124 CHAPTER VI. Early Essays in Authorship 148 CHAPTER VII. Friends and Companions 174 CHAPTER VIII. The Walden Hermitage 201 CHAPTER IX. Horace in the Role of Mæcenas 216 CHAPTER X. In Wood and Field 242 CHAPTER XI. Personal Traits and Social Life 261 CHAPTER XII. Poet, Moralist, and Philosopher 284 CHAPTER XIII. Life, Death, and Immortality 297 HENRY D. THOREAU. CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND FAMILY. There died in a city of Maine, on the river Penobscot, late in the year 1881, the last member of a family which had been planted in New England a little more than a hundred years before, by a young tradesman from the English island of Jersey, and had here produced one of the most characteristic American and New English men of genius whom the world has yet seen. This lady, Miss Maria Thoreau, was the last child of John Thoreau, the son of Philip Thoreau and his wife, Marie le Galais, who, a hundred years ago, lived in the parish of St. Helier, in Jersey. This John Thoreau was born in that parish, and baptized there in the Anglican church, in April, 1754; he emigrated to New England about 1773, and in 1781 married in Boston Miss Jane Burns, the daughter of a Scotchman of some estate in the neighborhood of Stirling Castle, who had emigrated earlier to Massachusetts, and had here married Sarah Orrok, the daughter of David Orrok, a Massachusetts Quaker. Jane (Burns) Thoreau, the granddaughter of David Orrok, and the grandmother of Henry David Thoreau, died in Boston, in 1796, at the age of forty-two. Her husband, John Thoreau, Sr., removed from Boston to Concord, in 1800, lived in a house on the village square, and died there in 1801. His mother, Marie le Galais, outlived him a few weeks, dying at St. Helier, in 1801. Maria Thoreau, granddaughter and namesake of Marie le Galais, died in December, 1881, in Bangor, Maine. From the recollections of this "aunt Maria," who outlived all her American relatives by the name of Thoreau, Henry Thoreau derived what information he possessed concerning his Jersey ancestors. In his journal for April 21, 1855, he makes this entry:-- "Aunt Maria has put into my hands to-day for safe-keeping three letters from Peter Thoreau (her uncle), directed to 'Miss Elizabeth Thoreau, Concord, near Boston,' and dated at Jersey, respectively, July 1, 1801, April 22, 1804, and April 11, 1806; also a '_Vue de la ville de St. Helier_,' accompanying the first letter. The first is in answer to one from my aunt Elizabeth, announcing the death of her father (my grandfather). He states that his mother (Marie (le Galais) Thoreau) died June 26, 1801, the day before he received aunt Elizabeth's letter, though not till after he had heard from another source of the death of his brother, which was not communicated to his mother. 'She was in the seventy-ninth year of her age,' he says, 'and retained her memory to the last. She lived with my two sisters, who took the greatest care of her.' He says that he had written to my grandfather about his oldest brother (who died about a year before), but had got no answer,--had written that he left his children, two sons and a daughter, in a good way: 'The eldest son and daughter are both married and have children; the youngest is about eighteen. I am still a widower. Of four children I have but two left,--Betsey and Peter; James and Nancy are both at rest.' He adds that he sends 'a view of our native town.' "The second of these letters is sent by the hand of Captain John Harvey, of Boston, then at Guernsey. On the 4th of February, 1804, he had sent aunt Elizabeth a copy of the last letter he had written (which was in answer to her second), since he feared she had not received it. He says that they are still at war with the French; that they received the day before a letter from her 'uncle and aunt Le Cappelain of London;' complains of not receiving letters, and says, 'Your aunts, Betsey and Peter join with me,' etc. According to the third letter (April 11, 1806), he had received by Capt. Touzel an answer to that he sent by Capt. Harvey, and will forward this by the former, who is going _via_ Newfoundland to Boston. 'He expects to go there every year; several vessels from Jersey go there every year.' His nephew had told him, some time before, that he met a gentleman from Boston, who told him he saw the sign 'Thoreau and Hayse' there, and he therefore thinks the children must have kept up the name of the firm. 'Your cousin John is a lieutenant in the British service; he has already been in a campaign on the Continent; he is very fond of it.' Aunt Maria thinks the correspondence ceased at Peter's death, because he was the one who wrote English." These memoranda indicate that the grandfather of Henry Thoreau was the younger son of a family of some substance in Jersey, which had a branch in London and a grandson in the army that fought under Wellington against Napoleon; that the American Thoreau engaged in trade in Boston, with a partner, and carried on business successfully for years; and that there was the same pleasant family feeling in the English and French Thoreaus that we shall see in their American descendants. Miss Maria Thoreau, in answer to a letter of mine, some years ago, sent me the following particulars of her ancestry, some of which repeat what is above stated by her nephew:-- "BANGOR, _March 18, 1878_. "MR. SANBORN. "_Dear Sir_,--In answer to your letter, I regret that I cannot find more to communicate. I have no earlier record of my grandparents, Philippe Thoreau and Marie Le Gallais, than a certificate of their baptism in St. Helier, Jersey, written on parchment in the year 1773. I do not know what their vocation was. My Father was born in St. Helier in April, 1754, and was married to Jane Burns in Boston, in 1781. She died in that city in the year 1796, aged forty-two years. My sister Elizabeth continued my Father's correspondence with his brother, Uncle Peter Thoreau, at St. Helier, for a number of years after Father's decease, and in one of his letters he speaks of the death of grandmother, Marie Le Gallais, as taken place so near the time intelligence reach'd them of Father's death, in 1801, it was not communicated to her. Father removed to Concord in 1800, and died there, of consumption. I do not know at what time he emigrated to this country, but have been told he was shipwreck'd on the passage, and suffered much. I think he must have left a large family circle, as Uncle Peter in his letters refers to aunts and cousins, two of which, aunts Le Cappelain and Pinkney, resided in London, and a cousin, John Thoreau, was an officer in the British army. "Soon after Father's arrival in Boston, probably, he open'd a store on Long Wharf, as documents addressed to 'John Thoreau, merchant,' appear to signify, and one subsequently purchased 'on King Street, afterward called State Street.' And now I will remark in passing that Henry's father was bred to the mercantile line, and continued in it till failure in business; when he resorted to pencil-making, and succeeded so well as to obtain the first medal at the Salem Mechanics' Fair. I think Henry could hardly compete with his father in pencil-making, any more than he, with his peculiar genius and habits, would have been willing to spend much time in such 'craft.' His father left no will, but a competency, at least, to his family, and what was done relative to the business after his death was accomplished by his daughter Sophia. I mention this to rectify Mr. Page's mistake relating to Henry. "And now, as I have written all I can glean of Father's family, I will turn to the maternal side, of which it appears, in religious belief, they were of the Quaker persuasion. But I was sorry to see, by good old great-great-grandfather Tillet's will, that slavery was tolerated in those days in the good State of Massachusetts, and handed down from generation to generation. My great-grandmother (Tillet) married David Orrok; her daughter, Sarah Orrok, married Mr. Burns, a Scotch gentleman. At what time he came to this country, or married, I cannot ascertain, but have often been told, to gain the consent to it of grandmother's Quaker parents, he was obliged to doff his rich apparel of gems and ruffles, and conform to the more simple garb of his Quaker bride. On a visit to his home in Scotland he died, in what year is not mentioned. Before my father's decease, a letter was received from the executor of grandfather's estate, dated Stirling, informing him there was property left to Jane Burns, his daughter in America, 'well worth coming after.' But Father was too much out of health to attend to the getting it; and the letter, subsequently put into a lawyer's hands by Brother, then the only heir, was lost. "It has been said I inherit more of the traits of my foreign ancestry than any of my family,--which pleases me. Probably the vivacity of the French and the superstition of the Scotch may somewhat characterize me,--which it is to be hop'd the experience of an octogenarian may suitably modify. But this is nothing, here nor there. And now that I have written all that is necessary, and perhaps more, I will close, with kind wishes for health and happiness. Yours respectfully, "MARIA THOREAU." It would be hard to compress more family history into a short letter, and yet leave it so sprightly in style as this. Of the four children of Maria Thoreau's brother John and Cynthia Dunbar,--John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,--the two eldest, John and Helen, were said to be "clear Thoreau," and the others, Henry and Sophia, "clear Dunbar;" though in fact the Thoreau traits were marked in Henry also. Let us see, then, who and what were the family of Henry Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, who was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787. She was the daughter of Rev. Asa Dunbar, who was born at Bridgewater, Mass., in 1745; graduated at Harvard College in 1767 (a classmate of Sir Thomas Bernard and Increase Sumner); preached for a while at Bedford, near Concord, in 1769, when he was "a young candidate, newly begun to preach;" settled in Salem in 1772; resigned his pastorate in 1779; and removed to Keene just at the close of the Revolution, where he became a lawyer, and died, a little upwards of forty-two, in 1787. He married before 1775, Miss Mary Jones, the daughter of Col. Elisha Jones, of Weston, a man of wealth and influence in his town, who died in 1776. Mrs. Mary (Jones) Dunbar long outlived the husband of her youth; in middle life she married a Concord farmer, Jonas Minott, whom she also outlived; and it was in his house that her famous grandson was born in July, 1817. Mrs. Minott was left a widow for the second time in 1813, when she was sixty-five years old, and in 1815 she sent a petition to the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, which was drawn up and indorsed by her pastor, Dr. Ripley, of Concord, and which contains a short sketch of Henry Thoreau's maternal grandfather, from whom he is said to have inherited many qualities. Mrs. Minott's petition sets forth "that her first husband, Asa Dunbar, Esq., late of Keene, N. H., was a native of Massachusetts; that he was for a number of years settled in the gospel ministry at Salem; that afterwards he was a counselor-at-law; that he was Master of a Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons at Keene, where he died; that in the cause of Masonry he was interested and active; that through some defection or misfortune of that Lodge _she_ has suffered loss, both on account of what was due to him and to her, at whose house they held their meetings; that in the settlement of the estate of her late husband, Jonas Minott, Esq., late of Concord, she has been peculiarly unfortunate, and become very much straitened in the means of living comfortably; that being thus reduced, and feeling the weight of cares, of years, and of widowhood to be very heavy, after having seen better days, she is induced, by the advice of friends, as well as her own exigencies, to apply for aid to the benevolence and charity of the Masonic fraternity." At the house of this decayed gentlewoman, about two years after the date of this petition, Henry Thoreau was born. She lived to see him running about, a sprightly boy, and he remembered her with affection. One of his earliest recollections of Concord was of driving in a chaise with his grandmother along the shore of Walden Pond, perhaps on the way to visit her relatives in Weston, and thinking, as he said afterward, that he should like to live there. Ellery Channing, whose life of his friend Henry is a mine of curious information on a thousand topics, relevant and irrelevant, and who often traversed the "old Virginia road" with Thoreau before the house in which he was born was removed from its green knoll to a spot further east, where it now stands, thus pictures the brown farm-house and its surroundings: "It was a perfect piece of our old New England style of building, with its gray, unpainted boards, its grassy, unfenced door-yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote from thoroughfares; on the Virginia road, an old-fashioned, winding, at length deserted pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchards, tumbling walls, and mossy banks. About it are pleasant sunny meadows, deep with their beds of peat, so cheering with its homely, hearth-like fragrance; and in front runs a constant stream through the centre of that great tract sometimes called 'Bedford levels,'--the brook a source of the Shawsheen River." (This is a branch of the Merrimac, as Concord River is, but flows into the main stream through Andover, and not through Billerica and Lowell, as the Concord does.) The road on which it stands, a mile and a half east of the Fitchburg railroad station, and perhaps a mile from Thoreau's grave in the village cemetery, is a by-path from Concord to Lexington, through the little town of Bedford. The farm-house, with its fields and orchard, was a part of Mrs. Minott's "widow's thirds," on which she was living at the date of her grandson's birth (July 12, 1817), and which her son-in-law, John Thoreau, was "carrying on" for her that year. Mrs. Minott, a few years before Dr. Ripley's petition in her behalf, came near having a more distinguished son-in-law, Daniel Webster, who, like the young Dunbars, was New Hampshire born, and a year or two older than Mrs. Minott's daughter, Louisa Dunbar. He had passed through Dartmouth College a little in love with two or three of the young ladies of Hanover, and had returned to his native town of Salisbury, N. H., when he met in Boscawen, near by, Miss Louisa, who, like Miss Grace Fletcher, whom he married a few years afterward, was teaching school in one of the New Hampshire towns. Miss Dunbar made an impression on Webster's heart, always susceptible, and, had the fates been propitious, he might have called Henry Thoreau nephew in after years; but the silken tie was broken before it was fairly knit. I suspect that she was the person referred to by one of Webster's biographers, who says, speaking of an incident that occurred in January, 1805: "Mr. Webster, at that time, had no thought of marrying; he had not even met the lady who afterward became his wife. He had been somewhat interested in another lady, who is occasionally referred to in his letters, written after he left college, but who was not either of those whom he had known at Hanover. But this affair never proceeded very far, and he had entirely dismissed it from his mind before he went to Boston in 1804." In January, 1806, about the time of his father's death, Webster wrote to a college friend, "I am not married, and seriously am inclined to think I never shall be," though he was then a humble suitor to Grace Fletcher. Louisa Dunbar was a lively, dark-haired, large-eyed, pleasing young lady, who had perhaps been educated in part at Boscawen, where Webster studied for college, and afterwards was a school-teacher there. She received from him those attentions which young men give to young ladies without any very active thoughts of marriage; but he at one time paid special attentions to her, which might have led to matrimony, perhaps, if Webster had not soon after fallen under the sway of a more fascinating school-teacher, Miss Grace Fletcher, of Hopkinton, N. H., whom he first saw at the door of her little school-house in Salisbury, not far from his own birthplace. A Concord matron, a neighbor and friend of the Dunbars and Thoreaus, heard the romantic story from Webster's own lips forty years afterward, as she was driving with him through the valley of the Assabet: how he was traveling along a New Hampshire road in 1805, stopped at a school-house to ask a question or leave a message, and was met at the door by that vision of beauty and sweetness, Grace Fletcher herself, to whom he yielded his heart at once. From a letter of Webster's to this Concord friend (Mrs. Louisa Cheney) I quote this description of his native region, which has never been printed:-- "FRANKLIN, N. H., _September 29, '45_. "DEAR MRS. CHENEY,--You are hardly expecting to hear from me in this remote region of the earth. Where I am was originally a part of Salisbury, the place of my birth; and, having continued to own my father's farm, I sometimes make a visit to this region. The house is on the west bank of Merrimac River, fifteen miles above Concord (N. H.), in a pleasant valley, made rather large by a turn in the stream, and surrounded by high and wooded hills. I came here five or six days ago, alone, to try the effect of the mountain air upon my health. "This is a very picturesque country. The hills are high, numerous, and irregular,--some with wooded summits, and some with rocky heads as white as snow. I went into a pasture of mine last week, lying high up on one of the hills, and had there a clear view of the White Mountains in the northeast, and of Ascutney, in Vermont, back of Windsor, in the west; while within these extreme points was a visible scene of mountains and dales, lakes and streams, farms and forests. I really think this region is the true Switzerland of the United States. "I am attracted to this particular spot by very strong feelings. It is the scene of my early years; and it is thought, and I believe truly, that these scenes come back upon us with renewed interest and more strength of feeling as we find years running over us. White stones, visible from the window, and close by, mark the grave of my father, my mother, one brother, and three sisters. Here are the same fields, the same hills, the same beautiful river, as in the days of my childhood. The human beings which knew them now know them no more. Few are left with whom I shared either toil or amusement in the days of youth. But this is melancholy and personal, and enough of it. One mind cannot enter fully into the feelings of another in regard to the past, whether those feelings be joyous or melancholy, or, which is more commonly the case, partly both. I am, dear Mrs. Cheney, yours truly, "DANIEL WEBSTER." No doubt the old statesman was thinking, as he wrote, not only of his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster ("with a complexion," said Stark, under whom he fought at Bennington, "that burnt gunpowder could not change"), of his mother and his brethren, but also of Grace Fletcher,--and echoing in his heart the verse of Wordsworth:-- "Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside a cottage fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine, too, is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed." It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting. She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau afterwards died, and where there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's magnificent head) "that she regarded Mr. Webster, under Providence, as the means of her conversion." Upon my asking how, she said that, in one of their drives,--perhaps in the spring of 1804,--he had spoken to her so seriously and scripturally on the subject of religion that her conscience was awakened, and she soon after joined the church, of which she continued through life a devout member. Her friendship for Mr. Webster also continued, and in his visits to Concord, which were frequent from 1843 to 1849, he generally called on her, or she was invited to meet him at the house of Mr. Cheney, where, among social and political topics, Webster talked with her of the old days at Boscawen and Salisbury. Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John Thoreau, who was a few months younger than herself, was born in Boston. When Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made this remark: "Keene Street strikes the traveler favorably; it is so wide, level, straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who was born and bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived there long enough to notice the chickens a mile off, but she occasionally visited her native town after her marriage in 1812, and a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.), now living, says, "I recollect Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-spirited woman, half a head taller than her husband, accomplished, after the manner of those days, with a voice of remarkable power and sweetness in singing." She was fond of dress, and had a weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons, which her austere friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson), once endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs. Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons of a good length and of a bright color,--perhaps yellow. During the call, in which Henry Thoreau was the subject of conversation, Miss Emerson kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter Sophia rose to go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God and a person of your years." In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of Rev. Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the separation of the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem North Church in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their new minister "admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he seems to have proved himself a learned and competent minister. But his health was infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon threw him into the profession of the law, which he honorably pursued for a few years at Keene." Whether he went at once to Keene on leaving Salem in 1779 does not appear, but he was practicing law there in 1783, and was also a leading Freemason. His diary for a few years of his early life--a faint foreshadowing of his grandson's copious journals--is still in existence, and indicates a gay and genial disposition, such as Mrs. Thoreau had. His only son, Charles Dunbar, who was born in February, 1780, and died in March, 1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but also that lack of reverence and discipline which is proverbial in New England for "ministers' sons and deacons' daughters." His nephew said of him, "He was born the winter of the great snow, and he died in the winter of another great snow,--a life bounded by great snows." At the time of Henry Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa and Sarah, and their brother Charles were living in Concord, or not far off, and there Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau. Her brother Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was a person widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:-- "People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott [a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock in wrestling. 'Now, don't hurt me,--don't throw me hard.' He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet, and so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he could do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He would toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and catch it on his head invariably. He once wanted to live at Hosmer's, but the latter was afraid of him. 'Can't we study up something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the house, and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles talked. 'You!' said he, 'I burst the bully of Haverhill.' He wanted to wrestle,--would not be put off. 'Well, we won't wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard, and a crowd got round. 'Come, spread some straw here,' said uncle Charles,--'I don't want to hurt him.' He threw him at once. They tried again; he told them to spread more straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that he hadn't a single tooth in his head. The fact was they were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of them by the time he was twenty-one. Ever since I knew him he could swallow his nose. He had a strong head, and never got drunk; would drink gin sometimes, but not to excess. Did not use tobacco, except snuff out of another's box, sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not profane, though vulgar." This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous, ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family. Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this humorous quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration. "Who sings the praise of woman in our clime? I do not boast her beauty or her grace: Some humble duties render her sublime, She, the sweet nurse of this New England race, The flower upon the country's sterile face; The mother of New England's sons, the pride Of every house where those good sons abide." Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his own business;" very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments. But _a kind neighbor_, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased, and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what she had said. Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals." There is no date, but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford is a town ten miles north of Concord, to which John Thoreau had removed for three years, in the infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford he went to Boston in 1821, but was successful in neither place, and soon returned to Concord, where he gave up trade and engaged in pencil-making, as already mentioned. From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village, educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a great degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing off Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss Dr. Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for years, and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery agitation. In the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged zealously, and their house remained for years headquarters for the early abolitionists and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. By this time, too,--I speak of the years from 1836 onward till the outbreak of the civil war,--the children of Mrs. Thoreau had reached an age and an education which made them noteworthy persons. Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished teacher. John, the elder son, born in 1814 was one of those lovely and sunny natures which infuse affection in all who come within their range; and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of soul, was a marked personage among the few who would give themselves the trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in 1819, had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch of art; and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the time, were superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms survived in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas that began to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not beyond their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the advancing spirit of the period. The children of the house, as they grew up, all became school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession. But they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity which "plain living and high thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew from that occupation,--declining the opportunities by which other young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success, and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct and individual existence, in which each person counted for something, and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that American society tends more and more to become. To meet one of the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your path. Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or social prominence, they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:-- "Je suis ni roi, ni prince aussi, Je suis le seigneur de Coucy." "Nor king, nor duke? Your pardon, no; I am the master of Thoreau." They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what Tennyson sings:-- "Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,-- With that wild wheel we go not up nor down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,-- For man is man, and master of his fate." CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:-- "It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has probably very near the smallest allowance. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. For the most part it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes." From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener, in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of the two shire towns of the great county of Middlesex,--Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,--attracting lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late years. Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont, loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market, whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes, sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic need,--bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'" Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody. Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in 1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to 1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853. Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line; and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr. Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit, counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband, Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence, Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he said:-- "I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes of families, and I believe this town to have been the dwelling-place, in all times since its planting, of pious and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths of common life, who served God and loved man, and never let go their hope of immortality. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws, no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrived to make pretty intelligible the will of a free and just community." Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was born. Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he remembered, and the one who entered on the records the marriage of his father and mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried the banns of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish meeting-house; and he was the last clerk who made this Sunday outcry. He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were cried at the opening of the service, and this compelled the town clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about half-way down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole congregation, whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries." Wearing his old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would rise in his pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for a moment, in order to make sure that his audience was prepared; then he made his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and dignity of manner. There was a distinction, however, in the manner of "publishing the banns" of the white and the black citizens; the former being "cried" in the face of the whole congregation, and the latter simply "posted" in the meeting-house porch, as was afterwards the custom for all. Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice, or some other proper motive, determined on one occasion to "post" a white couple, instead of giving them the full benefit of his sonorous voice; but, either because they missed the _éclat_ of the usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated at being "posted like niggers in the porch," they brought the town clerk to justice forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to popular outcry, and join in the outcry himself. After publishing his own banns, and just before the wedding, he for the first time procured a pair of trousers,--having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as Colonel May (the father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought it proper to wear them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior, 'Squire Brooks, of the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen put their trousers on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were generally put on over the head. Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as Marvell says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in Concord for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local justice for almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his contemporary, practiced in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all sixty-five years; and Dr. Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in Concord nearly fifty-eight years; while the united medical service of himself and his father, Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Charlestown, was one hundred and two years. Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble friend:-- "Well tried through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend, Officious, innocent, sincere, _Of every friendless name the friend_." He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather had kept him from visiting his distant patients,--sometimes miles away,--except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and mounted his horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped him off over his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and encouraged that proud creature to do his best in speed. One of his neighbors mentioned in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's, which was in the habit of running away. "By faith!" said the doctor (his familiar oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but I have no remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of seventy, he was looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if you were not so old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!" growled the doctor, "don't talk to me about _old_. Let's see your horse;" and he bought him, and drove him for eight years. He practiced among the poor with no hope of reward, and gave them, besides, his money, his time, and his influence. One day a friend saw him receiving loads of firewood from a shiftless man to whom he had rendered gratuitous service in sickness for twenty years. "Ah, doctor! you are getting some of your back pay." "By faith! no; the fellow is poor, so I paid him for his wood, and let him go." Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied the needed medical aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt in his first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months, removing then to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where Mr. Emerson afterwards established his residence, on the edge of Concord village. In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr. Ripley in the parish church, at the age of three months; and his mother boasted that he did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught him to walk when he was fourteen months old, and before he was sixteen months he removed to Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-house, where they kept the powder, in the garret," as was the custom in many village churches of New England then. Coming back to Concord before he was six years old, he soon began to drive his mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like other village boys; just as Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen years before, had driven his mother's cow where now the fine streets and halls are. Thoreau, like Emerson, began to go to school in Boston, where he lived for a year or more in Pinckney Street. But he returned to Concord in 1823, and, except for short visits or long walking excursions, he never left the town again till he died, in 1862. He there went on with his studies in the village schools, and fitted for Harvard College at the "Academy," which 'Squire Hoar, Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and other magnates of the town had established about 1820. This private school was generally very well taught, and here Thoreau himself taught for a while in after years. In his boyhood it had become a good place to study Greek, and in 1830, when perhaps Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles Emerson, visiting his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw there: "Mr. George Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at the Academy. We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying their Greek grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his Greek grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and was then proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to the "Concord Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured every winter. Concord, as the home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was always a place of resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might have seen and heard there all the celebrated congressmen and governors of Massachusetts, at one time and another. He could remember the visit of Lafayette to Concord in 1824, and the semi-centennial celebration of the Concord Fight in 1825. In 1830 he doubtless looked forward with expectation for the promised lecture of Edward Everett before the Lyceum, concerning which Mr. Everett wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November 3, 1830):-- "I am positively forbidden by my physician to come to Concord to-day. To obviate, as far as possible, the inconvenience which this failure might cause the Lyceum, I send you the lecture which I should have delivered. It is one which I have delivered twice before; but my health has prevented me from preparing another. Although _in print_, as you see, it has _not been published_. I held it back from publication to enable me, with propriety, to deliver it at Concord. Should you think it worth while to have it read to the meeting, it is at your service for that purpose; and, should this be done, I would suggest, as it is one hour and three quarters long, that some parts should be omitted. For this reason I have inclosed some passages in brackets, which can be spared without affecting the context." It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy forward, when he could not himself be there to read it. Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834, when he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he wrote to Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering to speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his lifetime, and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his first lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly every year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in his public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with opinions extremely heretical,--both being ardent radicals and "come-outers." A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his first appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner which Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp village controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side. But to return to the childhood and youth of Thoreau. When he was three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must die, as well as the men in the New England Primer, and having the joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from "coasting," that he did not want to die and go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for, he added, "the boys say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent." At the age of ten, says Channing, "he had the firmness of the Indian, and could repress his pathos, and had such seriousness that he was called 'judge.'" As an example of childish fortitude, it is related that he carried his pet chickens for sale to the tavern-keeper in a basket; whereupon Mr. Wesson told him to 'stop a minute,' and, in order to return the basket promptly, took the darlings out, and wrung their necks, one by one, before the boy's eyes, who wept inwardly, but did not budge. Having a knack at whittling, and being asked by a schoolmate to make him a bow and arrow, young Henry refused, not deigning to give the reason,--that he had no knife. "So through life," says Channing, "he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations." He was a sturdy and kindly playmate, whose mirthful tricks are yet remembered by those who frolicked with him, and he always abounded with domestic affection. While in college he once asked his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said, pleasantly, "You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam abroad to seek your fortune;" but the thought of leaving home and forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his cheeks. Then his sister Helen, who was standing by, says Channing, "tenderly put her arm around him and kissed him, saying, 'No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.'" And this, indeed, he did, though he made one or two efforts to seek his fortune for a time elsewhere. His reading had been wide and constant while at school, and after he entered college at the age of sixteen. His room in Cambridge was in Hollis Hall; his instructors were such as he found there, but in rhetoric he profited much by the keen intelligence of Professor Channing, an uncle of his future friend and biographer, Ellery Channing. I think he also came in contact, while in college, with that singular poet, Jones Very, of Salem. He was by no means unsocial in college, though he did not form such abiding friendships as do many young men. He graduated in 1837. His expenses at Cambridge, which were very moderate, compared with what a poor scholar must now pay to go through college, were paid in part by his father, in part by his aunts and his elder sister, Helen, who had already begun to teach school; and for the rest he depended on his own efforts and the beneficiary funds of the college, in which he had some little share. I have understood that he received the income of the same modest endowment which had been given to William and Ralph Waldo Emerson when in college, some years before; and in other ways the generous thought of that most princely man, Waldo Emerson, was not idle in his behalf, though he knew Thoreau then only as the studious son of a townsman, who needed a friend at court. What Mr. Emerson wrote to Josiah Quincy, who was then president of Harvard College, in behalf of Henry Thoreau does not appear, except from the terms of old Quincy's reply; but we may infer it. Thoreau had the resource of school-keeping in the country towns, during the college vacation and the extra vacation that a poor scholar could claim; and this brought him, in 1835, to an acquaintance with that elder scholar, Brownson, who afterwards became a Catholic doctor of theology. He left college one winter to teach school at Canton, near Boston, where he was examined by Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, then a Protestant minister in Canton. He studied German and boarded with Mr. Brownson while he taught the school. In 1836, he records in his journal that he "went to New York with father, peddling." In his senior year, 1836-37, he was ill for a time, and lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the ordinary college motives for study. This fact, and also that he was a beneficiary of the college, further appears from the letter of President Quincy to Mr. Emerson, as follows:-- "CAMBRIDGE, _25th June, 1837_. "MY DEAR SIR,--Your view concerning Thoreau is entirely in consent with that which I entertain. His general conduct has been very satisfactory, and I was willing and desirous that whatever falling off there had been in his scholarship should be attributable to his sickness. He had, however, imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty, and that they could not recommend him, consistent with the rule by which they are usually governed in relation to beneficiaries. I have always entertained a respect for and interest in him, and was willing to attribute any apparent neglect or indifference to his ill health rather than to wilfulness. I obtained from the instructors the authority to state all the facts to the Corporation, and submit the result to their discretion. This I did, and that body granted _twenty-five dollars_, which was within _ten_, or at most _fifteen_, dollars of any sum he would have received, had no objection been made. There is no doubt that, from some cause, an unfavorable opinion has been entertained, since his return after his sickness, of his disposition to exert himself. To what it has been owing may be doubtful. I appreciate very fully the goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral principle; and have done as much for him as, under the circumstances, was possible. "Very respectfully, your humble servant, "JOSIAH QUINCY. "Rev. R. W. EMERSON." It is possible the college faculty may have had other grounds of distrust in Thoreau's case. On May 30, 1836, his classmate Peabody wrote him the following letter from Cambridge,--Thoreau being then at home, for some reason,--from which we may infer that the sober youth was not averse to such deeds as are there related:-- "The Davy Club got into a little trouble, the week before last, from the following circumstance: H. W. gave a lecture on Pyrotechny, and illustrated it with a parcel of fireworks he had prepared in the vacation. As you may imagine, there was some slight noise on the occasion. In fact, the noise was so slight that Tutor B. heard it at his room in Holworthy. This worthy boldly determined to march forth and attack the 'rioters.' Accordingly, in the midst of a grand display of rockets, etc., he stepped into the room, and, having gazed round him in silent astonishment for the space of two minutes, and hearing various cries of 'Intrusion!' 'Throw him over!' 'Saw his leg off!' 'Pull his wool!' etc., he made two or three dignified motions with his hand to gain attention, and then kindly advised us to 'retire to our respective rooms.' Strange to say, he found no one inclined to follow this good advice, and _he_ accordingly thought fit to withdraw. There is, as perhaps you know, a law against keeping powder in the college buildings. The effect of Tutor B.'s intrusion was evident on the next Monday night, when H. W. and B. were invited to call and see President Quincy; and owing to the tough reasoning of Tutor B., who boldly asserted that 'powder was powder,' they were each presented with a public admonition. "We had a miniature volcano at Webster's lecture, the other morning [this was Professor Webster, afterwards hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman], and the odors therefrom surpassed all ever produced by Araby the Blest. Imagine to yourself all the windows and shutters of the lecture-room closed, and then conceive the delightful scent produced by the burning of nearly a bushel of sulphur, phosphoretted hydrogen, and other still more pleasant ingredients. As soon as the burning commenced, there was a general rush to the door, and a crowd collected there, running out every half minute to get a breath of fresh air, and then coming in to see the volcano. 'No noise nor nothing.' Bigelow and Dr. Bacon manufactured some 'laughing gas,' and administered it on the Delta. It was much better than that made by Webster. Jack Weiss took some, as usual; Wheeler, Jo Allen, and Hildreth each received a dose. Wheeler proceeded to dance for the amusement of the company, Jo jumped over the Delta fence, and Sam raved about Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, etc. He took two doses; it produced a great effect on him. He seemed to be as happy as a mortal could desire; talked with Shakespeare, Milton, etc., and seemed to be quite at home with them." The persons named were classmates of Thoreau: one of them afterward Rev. John Weiss; Wheeler was of Lincoln, and died early in Germany, whither he went to study; Samuel Tenney Hildreth was a brother of Richard Hildreth, the historian, and also died young. The zest with which his classmate related these pranks to Thoreau seems to imply in his correspondent a mind too ready towards such things to please the learned faculty of Cambridge. Mr. Quincy's letter was in reply to one which Mr. Emerson had written at the request of Mrs. Thoreau, who feared her son was not receiving justice from the college authorities. Thoreau graduated without much distinction, but with a good name among his classmates, and a high reputation for general scholarship. When he went to Maine, in May, 1838, to see if there was not some school for him to teach there, he took with him this certificate from his pastor, Dr. Ripley:-- "CONCORD, _May 1, 1838_. "TO THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION,--The undersigned very cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer, Mr. David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher branches of useful literature. He is a native of this town, and a graduate of Harvard University. He is well disposed and well qualified to instruct the rising generation. His scholarship and moral character will bear the strictest scrutiny. He is modest and mild in his disposition and government, but not wanting in energy of character and fidelity in the duties of his profession. It is presumed his character and usefulness will be appreciated more highly as an acquaintance with him shall be cultivated. Cordial wishes for his success, reputation, and usefulness attend him, as an instructor and gentleman. "EZRA RIPLEY, "_Senior Pastor of the First Church in Concord, Mass._ "N. B.--_It is but justice to observe here that the eyesight of the writer is much impaired._" Accompanying this artless document is a list of clergymen in the towns of Maine,--Portland, Belfast, Camden, Kennebunk, Castine, Ellsworth, etc.,--in the handwriting of the good old pastor, signifying that as young Thoreau traveled he should report himself to these brethren, who might forward his wishes. But even at that early date, I suspect that Thoreau undervalued the "D. D.'s" in comparison with the "chickadedees," as he plainly declared in his later years. Another certificate, in a firmer hand, and showing no token of impaired eyesight, was also carried by Thoreau in this first visit to Maine. It was this:-- "I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence of such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr. Thoreau's moral character, and in his intellectual ability. He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services. "R. WALDO EMERSON. "CONCORD, _May 2, 1838_." The acquaintance of Mr. Emerson with his young townsman had begun perhaps a year before this date, and had advanced very fast toward intimacy. It originated in this way: A lady connected with Mr. Emerson's family was visiting at Mrs. Thoreau's while Henry was in college, and the conversation turned on a lecture lately read in Concord by Mr. Emerson. Miss Helen Thoreau surprised the visitor by saying, "My brother Henry has a passage in his diary containing the same things that Mr. Emerson has said." This remark being questioned, the diary was produced, and, sure enough, the thought of the two passages was found to be very similar. The incident being reported to Mr. Emerson, he desired the lady to bring Henry Thoreau to see him, which was soon done, and the intimacy began. It was to this same lady (Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth) that Thoreau addressed one of his earliest poems,--the verses called "Sic Vita," in the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac," commencing:-- "I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied By a chance bond together." These verses were written on a strip of paper inclosing a bunch of violets, gathered in May, 1837, and thrown in at Mrs. Brown's window by the poet-naturalist. They show that he had read George Herbert carefully, at a time when few persons did so, and in other ways they are characteristic of the writer, who was then not quite twenty years old. It may be interesting to see what old Quincy himself said, in a certificate, about his stubbornly independent pupil. For the same Maine journey Cambridge furnished the Concord scholar with this document:-- "HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, _March 26, 1838_. "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,--I certify that Henry D. Thoreau, of Concord, in this State of Massachusetts, graduated at this seminary in August, 1837; that his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches, and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. He is recommended as well qualified as an instructor, for employment in any public or private school or private family. "JOSIAH QUINCY, "_President of Harvard University_." It seems that there was question, at this time, of a school in Alexandria, near Washington (perhaps the Theological Seminary for Episcopalians there), in which young Thoreau might find a place; for on the 12th of April, 1838, President Quincy wrote to him as follows:-- "SIR,--The school is at Alexandria; the students are said to be young men well advanced in ye knowledge of ye Latin and Greek classics; the requisitions are, qualification and _a person who has had experience in school keeping_. Salary $600 a year, besides washing and Board; duties to be entered on ye 5th or 6th of May. If you choose to apply, I will write as soon as I am informed of it. State to me your experience in school keeping. Yours, "JOSIAH QUINCY." We now know that Thoreau offered himself for the place; and we know that his journey to Maine was fruitless. He did, in fact, teach the town grammar school in Concord for a few weeks in 1837, and in July, 1838, was teaching, at the Parkman house, in Concord. He had already, as we have seen, though not yet twenty-one, appeared as a lecturer before the Concord Lyceum. It is therefore time to consider him as a citizen of Concord, and to exhibit further the character of that town. * * * * * _Note._--The Tutor mentioned on page 55 was Francis Bowen, afterward professor at Harvard; the other "B." was H. J. Bigelow, afterward a noted surgeon in Boston. CHAPTER III. CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS PEOPLE. The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its privileges,--and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the men of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the world, he is almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was born in Boston, Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing in Boston, Louisa Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but Thoreau was native to the soil. And since his genius has been shaped and guided by the personal traits of those among whom he lived, as well as by the hand of God and by the intuitive impulses of his own spirit, it is proper to see what the men of Concord have really been. It is from them we must judge the character of the town and its civilization, not from those exceptional, imported persons--cultivated men and women,--who may be regarded as at the head of society, and yet may have no representative quality at all. It is not by the few that a New England town is to be judged, but by the many. Yet there were a Few and a Many in Concord, between whom certain distinctions could be drawn, in the face of that general equality which the institutions of New England compel. Life in our new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks of modern civilization--so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within. It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord as I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from 1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display, while learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high thinking," which Wordsworth declared were gone from England, have never been absent from this New England town. It has always been a town of much social equality, and yet of great social and spiritual contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way for the two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all times some of them have had important connections with the great world of politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the founder and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver St. John, Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English family that, a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift. Another of the Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was descended, through his grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in its long pedigree, counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of England and some of his turbulent posterity. He was, says the epitaph over him in the village burying-ground, "a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal lover of mankind." In this character some representative gentleman of Concord has stood in every generation since the first settlement of the little town. The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a Scotch soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America. His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made commander-in-chief for Scotland. Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715, and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with some of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and the neighboring town of Stow. Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the Revolution, and one of his grandchildren was Captain Marryatt, the English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham, who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the clutches of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was living in Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph Perry, who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval officer in the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley from the Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents in Concord, whom he had not seen or heard from for many years. The stepson of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who graduated at Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir Archibald Campbell, when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch officer having visited at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's mother, while a prisoner in Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick was himself captured twice on his way to and from Holland and France, whither he went as secretary or attaché to our commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was taken to London; the second time to Halifax, where, as it happened, Sir Archibald was then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young Merrick went presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused admission by the sentinel,--while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald heard the conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his Concord friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little rebel?" and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his own experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston, S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there became the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he afterwards lost through reverses in business. Coming back to Concord in 1798, with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune, and inheriting his mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the Minott family, and became a country store-keeper in his native town. His daughter, Mrs. Brooks, was for many years the leader of the antislavery party in Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus, who at one time lived next door to her hospitable house. Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new bond of connection between the town and the great world outside this happy valley began to appear,--the genius of that man whose like has not been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our century:-- "A large and generous man, who, on our moors, Built up his thought (though with an Indian tongue, And fittest to have sung at Persian feasts), Yet dwelt among us as the sage he was,-- Sage of his days,--patient and proudly true; Whose word was worth the world, whose heart was pure. Oh, such a heart was his! no gate or bar; The poorest wretch that ever passed his door Welcome as highest king or fairest friend." This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force, and Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for so many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he fixed his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson was living there. It is said that he might have been called as a colleague for Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were too learned for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other outlying hamlets of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr. Emerson in Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston school, had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at intervals resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery Channing, one of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his bride, a sister of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne removed thither, upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister Sophia, in 1842. After noticing what went on about him for a few years, in his seclusion at the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described the attraction of Concord, in 1845: "It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after the death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was resorted to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances and at long intervals, to see and talk with him. There was in the village, too, a consular man, for many years the first citizen of Concord,--Samuel Hoar,--who made himself known abroad by sheer force of character and "plain heroic magnitude of mind." It was of him that Emerson said, at his death in November, 1856,-- "He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt that if one had met him in a cabin or in a forest he must still seem a public man, answering as sovereign state to sovereign state; and might easily suggest Milton's picture of John Bradshaw, that he 'was a consul from whom the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private seemed ever sitting in judgment on kings.' He returned from courts or congresses to sit down with unaltered humility, in the church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench, where Honor came and sat down beside him." In his house and in a few others along the elm-planted street, you might meet at any time other persons of distinction, beauty, or wit,--such as now and then glance through the shining halls of cities, and, in great centres of the world's civilization, like London or Paris, muster "In solemn troops and sweet societies," which are the ideal of poets and fair women, and the envy of all who aspire to social eminence. Thoreau knew the worth of this luxury, too, though, as a friend said of him, "a story from a fisher or hunter was better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors, where he was misunderstood." There were not many such parlors in Concord, but there was and had constantly been in the town a learned and social element, such as gathers in an old New England village of some wealth and inherited culture. At the head of this circle--which fell off on one side into something like fashion and mere amusement, on another into the activity of trade or politics, and rose, among the women especially, into art and literature and religion--stood, in Thoreau's boyhood and youth, a grave figure, yet with something droll about him,--the parish minister and county Nestor, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who lived and died in the "Old Manse." Dr. Ripley was born in 1751, in Woodstock, Conn., the same town in which Dr. Abiel Holmes, the father of the poet Holmes, was born. He entered Harvard College in 1772, came with the students to Concord in 1775, when the college buildings at Cambridge were occupied by Washington and his army, besieging Boston, and graduated in 1776. Among his classmates were Governor Gore, Samuel Sewall, the second chief-justice of Massachusetts of that name, and Royal Tyler, the witty chief-justice of Vermont. Governor Gore used to say that in college he was called "Holy Ripley," from his devout character. He settled in Concord in 1778, and at the age of twenty-nine married the widow of his last predecessor, Rev. William Emerson (and the daughter of his next predecessor, Rev. Daniel Bliss), who was at their marriage ten years older than her husband, and had a family of five children. Dr. Ripley's own children were three in number: the Reverend Samuel Ripley, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss Ripley, born August 1, 1784; and Miss Sarah Ripley, born August 8, 1789. When this daughter died, not long after her mother, in 1826, breaking, says Mr. Emerson, "the last tie of blood which bound me and my brothers to his house," Dr. Ripley said to Mr. Emerson, "I wish you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected." He died himself in September, 1841. Of Dr. Ripley countless anecdotes are told in his parish, and he was the best remembered person, except Thoreau himself, who had died in Concord, till Emerson; just as his house, described so finely by Hawthorne in his "Mosses," is still the best known house in Concord. It was for a time the home of Mr. Emerson, and there, it is said, he wrote his first book, "Nature," concerning which, when it came out anonymously, the question was asked, "Who is the author of 'Nature'?" The reply was, of course, "God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." The Old Manse was built about 1766 for Mr. Emerson's grandfather, then minister of the parish, and into it he brought his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss (daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, of Concord, and Phebe Walker, of Connecticut). Miss Mary Emerson, youngest child of this marriage, used to say "she was in arms at the battle of Concord," because her mother held her up, then two years old, to see the soldiers from her window; and from his study window her father saw the fight at the bridge. It was the scene of many of the anecdotes, told of Dr. Ripley, some of which, gathered from various sources, may here be given; it was also, after his death, one of the resorts of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, of Ellery Channing, of Dr. Hedge, and of the Transcendentalists in general. His parishioners to this day associate Dr. Ripley's form "with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit; with Watts's hymns; with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and, not less, with the report like musketry from the movable seats."[1] One of these "iron-gray deacons," Francis Jarvis, used to visit the Old Manse with his children on Sunday evenings, and his son, Dr. Edward Jarvis, thus describes another side of Dr. Ripley's pastoral character:-- "Among the very pleasant things connected with the Sabbaths in the Jarvis family were the visits to Dr. Ripley in the evening. The doctor had usually a small levee of such friends as were disposed to call. Deacon Jarvis was fond of going there, and generally took with him one of the children and his wife, when she was able. There were at these levees many of the most intelligent and agreeable men of the town,--Mr. Samuel Hoar, Mr. Nathan Brooks, Mr. John Keyes, Deacon Brown, Mr. Pritchard, Major Burr, etc. These were extremely pleasant gatherings. The little boys sat and listened, and remembered the cheerful and instructive conversation. There were discussions of religion and morals, of politics and philosophy, the affairs of the town, the news of the day, the religious and social gossip, pleasant anecdotes and witty tales. All were in their best humor. Deacon Jarvis [adds his son], did not go to these levees every Sunday night, though he would have been glad to do so, had he been less distrustful. When his children, who had no such scruples, asked him to go and take them with him, he said he feared that Dr. Ripley would not like to see him so frequently." According to Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley was "a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, and public spirited; his house open to all men." An old farmer who used to travel thitherward from Maine, where Dr. Ripley had a brother settled in the ministry, used to say that "no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor's gate." It was one of the listeners at his Sunday evening levees, no doubt, who said (at the time when Dr. Ripley was preparing for his first and last journey to Baltimore and Washington, in the presidency of the younger Adams) "that a man who could tell a story so well was company for kings and for John Quincy Adams." When P. M., after his release from the State Prison, had the effrontery to call on Dr. Ripley, as an old acquaintance, as they were talking together on general matters, his young colleague, Rev. Mr. Frost, came in. The doctor presently said, "Mr. M., my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (very well known to you), which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us." Mr. Emerson, his grandson (by Dr. Ripley's marriage with the widow of Rev. William Emerson) relates that he once went to a funeral with Dr. Ripley, and heard him address the mourners. As they approached the farm-house the old minister said that the eldest son, who was now to succeed the deceased father of a family in his place as a Concord yeoman, was in some danger of becoming intemperate. In his remarks to this son, he presently said,-- "Sir, I condole with you. I knew your great-grandfather; when I came to this town, in 1778, he was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that old family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If _you_ fail--Ichabod!--the glory is departed. Let us pray." He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner," says Mr. Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed in New England,--so that men might worship God with less fear. But he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from _ego_ and _mitto_), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord shepherd of his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:-- "Broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. My mind labors and is oppressed, viewing the present state of Christianity, and the various speculations, opinions, and practices of the passing period. Extremes appear to be sought and loved, and their novelty gains attention. You, sir, appear to retain and act upon the sentiment of the Latin phrase,-- "'Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines.' "The learned and estimable Norton appears to me to have weakened his hold on public opinion and confidence by his petulance or pride, his want of candor and charity." Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if replying to some compliment like this, and expressed himself thus, in a letter dated January 22, 1833,-- "I thank God for the testimony which you have borne to the usefulness of my writings. Such approbation from one whom I so much venerate, and who understands so well the wants and signs of the times, is very encouraging to me. If I have done anything towards manifesting Christianity in its simple majesty and mild glory I rejoice, and I am happy to have contributed anything towards the satisfaction of your last years. It would gratify many, and would do good, if, in the quiet of your advanced age, you would look back on the eventful period through which you have passed, and would leave behind you, or give now, a record of the changes you have witnessed, and especially of the progress of liberal inquiry and rational views in religion."[2] Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for present providences. He prayed for rain and against the lightning, "that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for exemption from sickness and insanity,--"that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr. Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer, but the old shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor, and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes bears on this point:-- "One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield, helping him, with his man, to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, 'We are in the Lord's hand,--mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's hand;' and seemed to say, 'You know me; this field is mine,--Dr. Ripley's, thine own servant.'" In his later years Dr. Ripley was much distressed by a schism in his church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and Maria,--the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not to the "Orthodox" church,--as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley, however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr. Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came "In sloven dress and broken rank," and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they "Fired the shot heard round the world," and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and cornfields. Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr. Ripley's gate, while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B. for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,--implying, if not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch, flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth; and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at first. This led to a long quarrel between minister and parishioner, in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier. Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things "from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time, the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young candidates for school-keeping--Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and the rest--addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then the great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms. Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man, from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner. In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau was living at Staten Island, Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court, which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar, was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester) held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for the defense. The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord:-- "You know enough of my miserable catarrh. Its history, since I left your hospitable roof, is not worth noting. There would be nothing found in it, either of the sublime or the beautiful; nothing fit for elegant description or a touch of sentiment. Not that it has not been a great thing in its way; for I think the _sneezing_ it has occasioned has been truly transcendental. A fellow-sufferer from the same affliction, who lived in Cohasset, was asked, the other day, what in the world he took for it? His reply was that he 'took eight handkerchiefs a day.' And this, I believe, is the approved mode of treatment; though the _doses_ here mentioned are too few for severe cases. Suffice it to say, my dear lady, that either from a change of air, or the progress of the season, or, what is more probable, from the natural progress of the disease itself, I am much better than when I left Concord, and I propose to return to Boston to-day, feeling, or hoping, that I may now be struck off the list of invalids." Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls, like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W. Emerson in his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said, briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble fell;--why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):-- "I should have liked to see Daniel Webster walking about Concord; I suppose the town shook, every step he took. But I trust there were some sturdy Concordians who were not tumbled down by the jar, but represented still the upright town. Where was George Minott? he would not have gone far to see him. Uncle Charles should have been there;--he might as well have been catching cat-naps in Concord as anywhere. And, then, what a whetter-up of his memory this event would have been! You'd have had all the classmates again in alphabetical order reversed,--'and Seth Hunt and Bob Smith--and he was a student of my father's--and where's Put now? and I wonder--you--if Henry's been to see George Jones yet? A little account with Stow--Balcolm--Bigelow--poor, miserable t-o-a-d (sound asleep). I vow--you--what noise was that? saving grace--and few there be. That's clear as preaching--Easter Brooks--morally depraved--how charming is divine philosophy--somewise and some otherwise--Heighho! (Sound asleep again.) Webster's a smart fellow--bears his age well. How old should you think he was? you--does he look as if he were two years younger than I?'" This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his sisters--the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau--had known Webster in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney, a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented with great elm trees, on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November 1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster said:-- "I have very much wished to see you all, and in the early part of October seriously contemplated going to Concord for a day. But I was hindered by circumstances, and partly deterred also by changes which have taken place. My valued friend, Mr. Phinney (of Lexington), is not living; and many of those whom I so highly esteemed, in your beautiful and quiet village, have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions, which I cannot (but) regard as so many vagaries of the imagination. These former warm friends would have no pleasure, of course, in intercourse with one of old-fashioned opinions. Nevertheless, dear Mrs. Cheney, if I live to see another summer, I will make a visit to your house, and talk about former times and former things." He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part, perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord after he had uttered his willingness to return fugitive slaves, but forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts as the Concord Cato had endured. Mr. Webster was attached to Concord--as most persons are who have ever spent pleasant days there--and used to compliment his friend on his house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born and brought up in Concord." CHAPTER IV. THE EMBATTLED FARMERS. It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry Thoreau specially,--but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity." Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born, though not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest; and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished. To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,--the Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook. From him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor, and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge. Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice." What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was called the "Black Horse Church,"--a seceding conventicle which met at the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village school as "the little black colt,"--a lad of adventurous spirit, with dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary. When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed, friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip, frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and where he leads the way they will surely follow." Four months later, in April, 1775, this Concord mechanic made good the words of his Tory townsman, for it was his speech to the minute-men which goaded them on to the fight. After forming the regiment as adjutant, he addressed them, closing with these words: "I have often heard it said that the British boasted they could march through our country, laying waste every village and neighborhood, and that we would not dare oppose them,--_and I begin to believe it is true_." Then turning to Major Buttrick, who commanded, and looking off from the hill-side to the village, from which a thick smoke was rising, he cried, "Will you let them burn the town down?" whereupon the sturdy major, who had no such intention, ordered his men to march; and when, a few minutes later, the British fired on his column of companies, the Acton men at the head, he sprang from the ground shouting, "Fire, fellow-soldiers, for God's sake fire!" and discharged his own piece at the same instant. The story has often been told, but will bear repetition. Thoreau heard it in 1835 from the lips of Emerson, as he pronounced the centennial discourse in honor of the town's settlement and history; but he had read it and heard it a hundred times before, from his earliest childhood. Mr. Emerson added, after describing the fight:-- "These poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory; they never dreamed their children would contend which had done the most. They supposed they had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying tribute to any but their own governors. And as they had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God. Captain Charles Miles, who was wounded in the pursuit of the enemy, told my venerable friend (Dr. Ripley), who sits by me, 'that he went to the services of that day with the same seriousness and acknowledgment of God, which he carried to church.'" Humphrey Barrett, fifth in descent from the original settler, was born in 1752, on the farm his ancestors had owned ever since 1640, and was no doubt in arms at Concord Fight in 1775. His biographer says:-- "Some persons slightly acquainted with him in the latter part of his life, judged him to be unsocial, cold, and indifferent, but those most acquainted with him knew him to be precisely the reverse. The following acts of his life make apparent some traits of his character. A negro, by the name of Cæsar Robbins, had been in the habit of getting all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr. Barrett's wood-lot near by him; this being done with the knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent of the owner. Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own use from another part of his farm; but on one occasion he thought he would get it from the lot by Cæsar's. He accordingly sent two men with two teams, with directions to cut only hard wood. The men had been gone but a few hours when Cæsar came to Mr. Barrett's house, his face covered with sweat, and in great agitation, and says, 'Master Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men and teams have broke into our wood-lot, and are making terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we do something immediately I shall be ruined.' Mr. Barrett had no heart to resist this appeal of Cæsar's; he told him not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt, and would put the matter right. He then wrote an order to his men to cut no more wood, but to come directly home with their teams, and sent the order by Cæsar."[3] The biographer of Mr. Barrett, who was also his attorney and legal adviser, goes on to say:-- "A favorite nephew who bore his name, and whose guardian he was, died under age in 1818, leaving a large estate, and no relatives nearer than uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts. Mr. Barrett believed that the estate in equity ought to be distributed equally between the uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts by right of representation.[4] And although advised that such was not the law, he still insisted upon having the question carried before the Supreme Court for decision; and when the court decided against his opinion, he carried out his own views of equity by distributing the portion that fell to him according to his opinion of what the law ought to be. After he had been fully advised that the estate would be distributed in a manner he thought neither equitable nor just, he applied to the writer to make out his account as guardian; furnishing the evidence, as he believed, of the original amount of all his receipts as such guardian. I made the account, charging him with interest at six per cent. on all sums from the time of receipt till the time of making the account. Mr. Barrett took the account for examination, and soon returned it with directions to charge him with compound interest, saying that he believed he had realized as much as that. I accordingly made the account conform to his directions. He then wished me to present this account to the party who claimed half the estate, and ask him to examine it with care and see if anything was omitted. This was done, and no material omission discovered, and no objection made. Mr. Barrett then said that he had always kept all the property of his ward in a drawer appropriated for the purpose; that he made the amount of property in the drawer greater than the balance of the account; and (handing to me the contents of the drawer) he wished me to ascertain the precise sum to which it amounted. I found that it exceeded the balance of the account by $3,221.59. He then told me, in substance, that he was quite unwilling to have so large an amount of property go where it was in danger of being distributed inequitably, and particularly as he was confident he had disclosed every source from which he had realized any property of his ward, and also the actual amount received; _but_, as he knew not how it got into the drawer, and had intended all the property there to go to his nephew, he should not feel right to retain it, and therefore directed me to add it to the amount of the estate,--which was done."[5] Conceive a community in which such characters were common, and imagine whether the claim of King George and the fine gentlemen about him, to tax the Americans without their own consent would be likely to succeed! I find in obscure anecdotes like this sufficient evidence that if John Hampden had emigrated to Massachusetts when he had it in mind, he would have found men like himself tilling their own acres in Concord. The Barretts, from their name, may have been Normans, but, like Hampden, the Hosmers were Saxons, and held land in England before William the Conqueror. When Major Hosmer, who was adjutant, and formed the line of the regiment that returned the British fire at Concord Bridge, had an estate to settle about 1785, the heir to which was supposed to be in England, he employed an agent, who was then visiting London, to notify the heir, and also desired him to go to the Heralds' Office and ascertain what coat-of-arms belonged to any branch of the Hosmer family. When the agent (who may have been Mr. Tilly Merrick, of Concord, John Adams's attaché in Holland), returned to America, after reporting his more important business to Major Hosmer, he added,-- "I called at the Heralds' Office in London, and the clerk said, '_There was no coat-of-arms for you, and, if you were an Englishman you would not want one; for_ (he said) _there were Hosmers in Kent long before the Conquest; and at the battle of Hastings, the men of Kent were the vanguard of King Harold_.'" If Major Hosmer's ancestors failed to drive back the invaders then, their descendants made good the failure in Concord seven centuries later. Thoreau's favorite walk, as he tells us,--the pathway toward Heaven,--was along the old Marlborough road, west and southwest from Concord village, through deep woods in Concord and in Sudbury. To reach this road he passed by the great Hosmer farm-house, built by the old major already mentioned, in 1760 or thereabout, and concerning which there is a pretty legend that Thoreau may have taken with him along the Marlborough road. In 1758, young Jo. Hosmer, "the little black colt," drove to Marlborough one autumn day with a load of furniture he had made for Jonathan Barnes, a rich farmer, and town clerk in thrifty Marlborough. He had received the money for his furniture, and was standing on the doorstep, preparing to go home, when a young girl, Lucy Barnes, the daughter of the house, ran up to him and said, "Concord woods are dark, and a thunderstorm is coming up; you had better stay all night." "Since you ask me, I will," was the reply, and the visit was often repeated in the next few months. But when he asked farmer Jonathan for his daughter, the reply was,-- "Concord plains are barren soil. Lucy had better marry her cousin John, whose father will give him one of the best farms in Marlborough, with a good house on it, and Lucy can match his land acre for acre." Joseph returned from that land of Egypt, and like a wise youth took the hint, and built a house of his own, planting the elm trees that now overshadow it, after a hundred and twenty years. After the due interval he went again to Marlborough, and found Lucy Barnes in the September sunshine, gathering St. Michael's pears in her father's garden. Cousin John was married, by this time, to another damsel. Miss Lucy was bent on having her own way and her own Joseph; and so Mr. Barnes gave his consent. They were married at Christmas, 1761; and Lucy came home behind him on his horse, through the same Concord woods. She afterwards told her youngest son, with some pique:-- "When my brother Jonathan was married, and went to New Hampshire, twenty couples on horseback followed them to Haverhill, on the Merrimac, but when your father and I were married, we came home alone through these dark Concord woods."[6] The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:-- "I can recall with peculiar pleasure a vacation passed in Concord in my senior year, which Loammi Baldwin, Lemuel Shaw, Washington Allston, and myself spent with Rufus Hosmer at his father's house. I recall the benign face of Major Hosmer, as he stood in the door to receive us, with his handsome daughter-in-law (the wife of Capt. Cyrus Hosmer) on his arm. There was a charming circle of young people then living in Concord, and we boys enjoyed this very much; but we liked best of all to stay at home and listen to the Major's stories. It was very pleasant to have a rainy day come for this, and hard to tell which seemed the happier, he or we." Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town. Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar, long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later life, once said,-- "In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way, 'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you see, the man's on the wrong side.'" Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,-- "I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as clearly as they did the outside." He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law, and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said, "from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the same opinion of Daniel Webster. Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord. This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four hundred acres ever since it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid, and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner, and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of "old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was one of his most accustomed haunts, since the river flowed round it for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a dithyrambic verse:-- "With frontier strength ye stand your ground, With grand content ye circle round, (Tumultuous silence for all sound), Ye distant nursery of rills, Monadnoc and the Peterboro hills; * * * * * But special I remember thee, Wachusett, who, like me, Standest alone without society; Thy far blue eye A remnant of the sky." Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson, and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize in the plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the plow-handles,"--then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began, and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman, an accomplished dancer, and in the hayfield excelled in the graceful sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork. In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors, and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs. Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in 1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack." Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character, Edmund Hosmer, a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in 1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:-- "On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the crunching of the snow, made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social 'crack;' one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms;' who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned,--for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty." Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for a time, has been celebrated in prose and verse by other Concord authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his apologue of Saadi, many years ago:-- "Said Saadi,--When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver's door, I scorned the fame of Timour brave,-- Timour to Hassan was a slave. In every glance of Hassan's eye I read rich years of victory. And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides. I shunned his eyes--the faithful man's, I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance." Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And it may be that he was Ellery Channing's "Spicy farming sage, Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age, Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year, And springs from bed each morning with a cheer. Of all his neighbors he can something tell, 'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well! The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring,-- Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing." Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":-- "This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire, His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak; He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher Than pensioned blows.--he owned the tree he stroke, And knows the value of the distant smoke, When he returns at night, his labor done, Matched in his action with the long day's sun." Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm, which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore, another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,--bettered as it had been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said:-- "Look across the fence into Captain Hardy's land. There's a musician for you who knows how to make men dance for him in all weathers,--all sorts of men,--Paddies, felons, farmers, carpenters, painters,--yes, and trees, and grapes, and ice, and stone,--hot days, cold days. Beat that true Orpheus lyre if you can. He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow, and lay stone-wall; to make trees bear fruit God never gave them, and foreign grapes yield the juices of France and Spain, on his south side. He saves every drop of sap, as if it were his blood. See his cows, his horses, his swine! And he, the piper that plays the jig they all must dance, biped and quadruped, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin, in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the waters, hills, and meadows. With one blast of his pipe he danced a thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap to the bog-meadow, where the English grass is waving over thirty acres; with another, he winded away sixty head of cattle in the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro' on the hills." Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show in October was his chief festival,--one of the things he regretted, when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess. He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro, and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were daily obeying Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the maxims of a more remote antiquity. "I see the old, pale-faced farmer walking beside his team, with contented thoughts," he says, "for the five thousandth time. This drama every day in the streets; this is the theatre I go to.... Human life may be transitory and full of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is superior to change. I will identify myself with that which did not die with Columella, and will not die with Hosmer." * * * * * _Note._--The account of "Captain Hardy" was copied by Channing from Emerson's Journal into the first biography of Thoreau, without the name of the author; and so was credited by me to Thoreau in a former edition of this book. CHAPTER V. THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD. Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy, the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his imagination, was determined by Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my next effort, then, to give some hint--not a brief chronicle--of that extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July, 1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the trumpet. In these forty-five years,--a longer period than the age of Pericles, or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,--New England Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism. It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted hitherward, was a certain inward tendency of high Calvinism and its counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies. Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont, in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield, in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion, "an ingenious Quakerism,"--that is, a faith in divine communication that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings. Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:-- "There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world; and there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it, and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and a singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her." Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of little Durham, in New Hampshire,--being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell, just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg--wrote to them in March, 1745,--to Sir William thus:-- "Do you indeed love the Lord? do you make the Lord your Guide and Counselor in ye affair? If you have a Soul, great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord, and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall know that, and everything else needful, one thing after another, as fast as you are prepared for it. But God will, doubtless, humble such as leave him out of their Schemes, as though his Providence was not at all concerned in the matter--whereas his Blessing is all in all." To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:-- "Are you sufficiently sure that his call is from above, that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to this Expedition? Would it be no advantage to his Estate to win the place? May he not have a prospect of doubling his Wealth and Honours, if crowned with Success? What Demonstration has he given of being so entirely devoted to the Lord? He has a vast many Talents,--is it an easy thing for so Wise a man to become a Fool for Christ? so great a man to become a Little Child? so rich a man to crowd in at the Strait Gate of Conversion, and make so little noise?... If you see good to encourage the Expedition, be fully satisfy'd the project was formed in Heaven. Was the Lord first consulted in the affair? Did they wait for his Counsell?" John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772), said,-- "There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which, in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion, nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become brethren. That state in which every motion from the selfish spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge with gratitude to the Father of Mercies, is often opened before me as a pearl to seek after."[7] That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden (a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem, "The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:-- "_January 31._ Bought a shay for £27 10_s._ The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family. "_March, 1735._ Had a safe and comfortable journey to York. "_April 24._ Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver! Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful the preservation! "_May 5._ Went to the Beach with three of the children. The Beast being frighted, when we were all out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study, and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses? "_May 15._ Shay brought home; mending cost 30 shillings. Favored in this beyond expectation. "_May 16._ My wife and I rode to Rumney Marsh. The Beast frighted several times." At last this divine comedy ends with the pathetic conclusive line,-- "_June 4._ Disposed of my shay to the Rev. Mr. White." I will not pause to dwell on the laughable episodes and queer characteristic features of the Transcendental Period, though such it had in abundance. They often served to correct the soberer absurdity with which our whole country was slipping unconsciously down the easy incline of national ruin and dishonor,--from which only a bloody civil war could at last save us. Thoreau saw this clearly, and his political utterances, paradoxical as they seemed in the two decades from 1840 to 1860, now read like the words of a prophet. But there are some points in the American Renaissance which may here be touched on, so much light do they throw on the times. It was a period of strange faiths and singular apocalypses--that of Charles Fourier being one. In February, 1843, Mr. Emerson, writing to Henry Thoreau from New York, where he was then lecturing, said:-- "Mr. Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour and a half of what he calls his principles, and he shames truer men by his fidelity and zeal; and already begins to hear the reverberations of his single voice from most of the States of the Union. He thinks himself sure of W. H. Channing here, as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous whilst he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating paragraphs out of his master's book) descriptions of the self-augmenting potency of the solar system, which is destined to contain one hundred and thirty-two bodies, I believe,--and his urgent inculcation of our _stellar duties_. But it has its kernel of sound truth, and its insanity is so wide of the New York insanities that it is virtue and honor." This was written a few months before Thoreau himself went to New York, and it was while there that he received from his friends in Concord and in Harvard, the wondrous account of Mr. Alcott's Paradise Regained at Fruitlands; where in due time Thoreau made his visit and inspected that Garden of Eden on the Coldspring Brook. If Mr. Brisbane had his "stellar duties" and inculcated them in others, the Brook Farmers of 1842-43 had their planetary mission also; namely, to cultivate the face of the planet they inhabited, and to do it with their own hands, as Adam and Noah did. Of the Brook Farm enterprise much has been written, and much more will be; but concerning the more individual dream of Thoreau's friends at "Fruitlands," less is known; and I may quote a few pages concerning it from Thoreau's correspondence. While Thoreau was at Staten Island in 1843, Mr. Emerson wrote to him often, giving the news of Concord as a Transcendental capital. In May of that year we have this intelligence:-- "Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very agreeable to me. Young Ball (B. W.) has been to see me, and is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise,--born, too, in the good town. Mr. Hawthorne is well, and Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of ninety acres." This was "Fruitlands," described in the "Dial" for 1843, and which Charles Lane himself describes in a letter soon to be cited. In June, 1843, Mr. Emerson again sends tidings from Concord, where the Fitchburg railroad was then building:-- "The town is full of Irish, and the woods of engineers, with theodolite and red flag, singing out their feet and inches to each other from station to station. Near Mr. Alcott's (the Hosmer cottage) the road is already begun. From Mr. A. and Mr. Lane at Harvard we have yet heard nothing. They went away in good spirits, having sent 'Wood Abram' and Larned, and William Lane before them with horse and plow, a few days in advance, to begin the spring work. Mr. Lane paid me a long visit, in which he was more than I had ever known him gentle and open; and it was impossible not to sympathize with and honor projects that so often seem without feet or hands. They have near a hundred acres of land which they do not want, and no house, which they want first of all. But they account this an advantage, as it gives them the occasion they so much desire,--of building after their own idea. In the event of their attracting to their company a carpenter or two, which is not impossible, it would be a great pleasure to see their building,--which could hardly fail to be new and beautiful. They have fifteen acres of woodland, with good timber." Then, passing in a moment from "Fruitlands" to Concord woods, Thoreau's friend writes:-- "Ellery Channing is excellent company, and we walk in all directions. He remembers you with great faith and hope, thinks you ought not to see Concord again these ten years; that you ought to grind up fifty Concords in your mill; and much other opinion and counsel he holds in store on this topic. Hawthorne walked with me yesterday afternoon, and not until after our return did I read his 'Celestial Railroad,' which has a serene strength we cannot afford not to praise, in this low life. I have letters from Miss Fuller at Niagara. She found it sadly cold and rainy at the Falls." Not so with Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane in the first flush of their hopes at Fruitlands. On the 9th of June,--the date of the letter just quoted being June 7,--Mr. Lane writes to Thoreau:-- "DEAR FRIEND,--The receipt of two acceptable numbers of the 'Pathfinder' reminds me that I am not altogether forgotten by one who, if not in the busy world, is at least much nearer to it externally than I am. Busy indeed we all are, since our removal here; but so recluse is our position, that with the world at large we have scarcely any connection. You may possibly have heard that, after all our efforts during the spring had failed to place us in connection with the earth, and Mr. Alcott's journey to Oriskany and Vermont had turned out a blank,--one afternoon in the latter part of May, Providence sent to us the legal owner of a slice of the planet in this township (Harvard), with whom we have been enabled to conclude for the concession of his rights. It is very remotely placed, nearly three miles beyond the village, without a road, surrounded by a beautiful green landscape of fields and woods, with the distance filled up by some of the loftiest mountains in the State. The views are, indeed, most poetic and inspiring. You have no doubt seen the neighborhood; but from these very fields, where you may at once be at home and out, there is enough to love and revel in for sympathetic souls like yours. On the estate are about fourteen acres of wood, part of it extremely pleasant as a retreat, a very sylvan realization, which only wants a Thoreau's mind to elevate it to classic beauty. "I have some imagination that you are not so happy and so well housed in your present position as you would be here amongst us; although at present there is much hard manual labor,--so much that, as you perceive, my usual handwriting is very greatly suspended. We have only two associates in addition to our own families; our house accommodations are poor and scanty; but the greatest want is of good female aid. Far too much labor devolves on Mrs. Alcott. If you should light on any such assistance, it would be charitable to give it a direction this way. We may, perhaps, be rather particular about the quality; but the conditions will pretty well determine the acceptability of the parties without a direct adjudication on our part. For though to me our mode of life is luxurious in the highest degree, yet generally it seems to be thought that the setting aside of all impure diet, dirty habits, idle thoughts, and selfish feelings, is a course of self-denial, scarcely to be encountered or even thought of in such an alluring world as this in which we dwell. "Besides the busy occupations of each succeeding day, we form, in this ample theatre of hope, many forthcoming scenes. The nearer little copse is designed as the site of the cottages. Fountains can be made to descend from their granite sources on the hill-slope to every apartment if required. Gardens are to displace the warm grazing glades on the south, and numerous human beings, instead of cattle, shall here enjoy existence. The farther wood offers to the naturalist and the poet an exhaustless haunt; and a short cleaning of the brook would connect our boat with the Nashua. Such are the designs which Mr. Alcott and I have just sketched, as, resting from planting, we walked round this reserve. "In your intercourse with the dwellers in the great city, have you alighted on Mr. Edward Palmer, who studies with Dr. Beach, the Herbalist? He will, I think, from his previous nature-love, and his affirmations to Mr. Alcott, be animated on learning of this actual wooing and winning of Nature's regards. We should be most happy to see him with us. Having become so far actual, from the real, we might fairly enter into the typical, if he could help us in any way to types of the true metal. We have not passed away from home, to see or hear of the world's doings, but the report has reached us of Mr. W. H. Channing's fellowship with the Phalansterians, and of his eloquent speeches in their behalf. Their progress will be much aided by his accession. To both these worthy men be pleased to suggest our humanest sentiments. While they stand amongst men, it is well to find them acting out the truest possible at the moment. "Just before we heard of this place, Mr. Alcott had projected a settlement at the Cliffs on the Concord River, cutting down wood and building a cottage; but so many more facilities were presented here that we quitted the old classic town for one which is to be not less renowned. As far as I could judge, our absence promised little pleasure to our old Concord friends; but at signs of progress I presume they rejoiced with, dear friend, "Yours faithfully, "CHARLES LANE." Another Palmer than the Edward here mentioned became an inmate of "Fruitlands," and, in course of time its owner; the abandoned paradise, which was held by Mr. Lane and Mr. Alcott for less than a year, is now the property of his son. Mr. Lane, after a time, returned to England and died there; Mr. Alcott to Concord, where, in 1845, he aided Thoreau in building his hut by Walden. Mr. Channing (the nephew and biographer of Dr. Channing) continued his connection with the "Phalansterians" in New Jersey until 1849 or later, for in that year Fredrika Bremer found him dwelling and preaching among them, at the "North American Phalanstery," to which he had been invited from his Unitarian parish in Cincinnati, about the time that Brook Farm was made a community, and before Mr. Alcott's dream had taken earthly shape at "Fruitlands." The account given by Miss Bremer of the terms upon which Mr. Channing was thus invited to New Jersey, show what was the spirit of Transcendentalism then, on its social side. They said to him,-- "Come to us,--be our friend and spiritual shepherd, but in perfect freedom. Follow your own inspiration,--preach, talk to us, how and when it appears best to you. We undertake to provide for your pecuniary wants; live free from anxiety, how, and where you will; but teach us how we should live and work; our homes and our hearts are open to you." It was upon such terms as this, honorable alike to those who gave and those who received, that much of the intellectual and spiritual work of the Transcendental revival was done. There was another and an unsocial side to the movement also, which Mr. Emerson early described in these words, that apply to Thoreau and to Alcott at one period:-- "It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof; they feel the disproportion between themselves and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work and crying out for somewhat worthy to do. They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house; to live in the country rather than in the town; and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. They are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign or domestic, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth; they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can do nothing for humanity." It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,--this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. I know few epistles more pathetic in their humility and concern for the future, than one which Dr. Ripley addressed to Dr. Channing in February, 1839, after hearing and meditating on the utterances of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, and the other "apostles of the newness," who disturbed with their oracles the quiet air of his parish. He wrote:-- "Denied, as I am, the privilege of going from home, of visiting and conversing with enlightened friends, and of reading even; broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. Some reason is left,--my mental powers, though weak, are yet awake, and I long to be doing something for good. The contrast between paper and ink is so strong, that I can write better than do anything else. In this way I take the liberty to express to you a few thoughts, which you will receive as well-meant and sincere.... "We may certainly assume that whatever is unreasonable, self-contradictory, and destitute of common sense, is erroneous. Should we not be likely to find the truth, in all moral subjects, were we to make more use of plain reason and common sense? I know that our modern speculators, Transcendentalists, or, as they prefer to be called, Realists, presume to follow Reason in her purest dictates, her sublime and unfrequented regions. They presume, by her power, not only to discover what is truth, but to judge of revealed truth. But is not their whole process marred by leaving out common sense, by which mankind are generally governed? That superiority which places a man above the power of doing good to his fellow-men seems to me not very desirable. I honor most the man who transcends others in capacity and disposition to do good, and whose daily practice corresponds with his profession. Here I speak of professed Christians. I would not treat with disrespect and severe censure men who advance sentiments which I may neither approve nor understand, provided their authors be men of learning, piety, and holy lives. The speculations and novel opinions of _such_ men rarely prove injurious. Nevertheless, I would that their mental endowments might find a better method of doing good,--a more simple and intelligible manner of informing and reforming their fellow-men.... "The hope of the gospel is my hope, my consolation, support and rejoicing. Such is my state of health that death is constantly before me; no minute would it be unexpected. I am waiting in faith and hope, but humble and penitent for my imperfections and faults. The prayer of the publican, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!' is never forgotten. I have hoped to see and converse with you, but now despair. If you shall think I use too much freedom with you, charge it to the respect and esteem which are cherished for your character by your affectionate friend and brother, "E. RIPLEY. "CONCORD, _February 26, 1839_." At this time Dr. Ripley was almost eighty-eight, and he lived two years longer, to mourn yet more pathetically over the change of times and manners. "It was fit," said Emerson, "that in the fall of laws, this loyal man should die." But the young men who succeeded him were no less loyal to the unwritten laws, and from their philosophy, which to the old theologian seemed so misty and unreal, there flowered forth, in due season, the most active and world-wide philanthropies. Twenty years after this pastoral epistle, there came to Concord another Christian of the antique type, more Puritan and Hebraic than Dr. Ripley himself, yet a Transcendentalist, too,--and JOHN BROWN found no lack of practical good-will in Thoreau, Alcott, Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists. The years had "come full circle," the Sibyl had burnt her last prophetic book, and the new æon was about to open with the downfall of slavery. CHAPTER VI. EARLY ESSAYS IN AUTHORSHIP. It has been a common delusion, not yet quite faded away, that the chief Transcendentalists were but echoes of each other,--that Emerson imitated Carlyle, Thoreau and Alcott imitated Emerson, and so on to the end of the chapter. No doubt that the atmosphere of each of these men affected the others, nor that they shared a common impulse communicated by what Matthew Arnold likes to call the _Zeitgeist_,--the ever-felt spirit of the time. In the most admirable of the group, who is called by preëminence "the Sage of Concord,"--the poet Emerson,--there has been an out-breathing inspiration as profound as that of the _Zeitgeist_ himself; so that even Hawthorne, the least susceptible of men, found himself affected as he says, "after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's." But, in fact, Thoreau brought to his intellectual tasks an originality as marked as Emerson's, if not so brilliant and star-like--a patience far greater than his, and a proud independence that makes him the most solitary of modern thinkers. I have been struck by these qualities in reading his yet unknown first essays in authorship, the juvenile papers he wrote while in college, from the age of seventeen to that of twenty, before Emerson had published anything except his first little volume, "Nature," and while Thoreau, like other young men, was reading Johnson and Goldsmith, Addison and the earlier English classics, from Milton backward to Chaucer. Let me therefore quote from these papers, carefully preserved by him, with their dates, and sometimes with the marks of the rhetorical professor on their margins. Along with these may be cited some of his earlier verses, in which a sentiment more purely human and almost amatory appears, than in the later and colder, if higher flights of his song. The earliest writings of Thoreau, placed in my hands by his literary executor, Mr. Harrison Blake of Worcester, are the first of his Cambridge essays, technically called "themes" and "forensics." These began several years before his daily journals were kept, namely, in 1834; and it is curious that one of them, dated January 17, 1835, but written in 1834, recommends "keeping a private journal or record of our thoughts, feelings, studies, and daily experience." This is precisely what Thoreau did from 1837 till his death; and it may be interesting to see what reasons the boy of seventeen advanced for the practice. He says:-- "As those pieces which the painter sketches for his own amusement, in his leisure hours, are often superior to his most elaborate productions, so it is that ideas often suggest themselves to us spontaneously, as it were, far surpassing in beauty those which arise in the mind upon applying ourselves to any particular subject. Hence, could a machine be invented which would instantaneously arrange upon paper each idea as it occurs to us, without any exertion on our part, how extremely useful would it be considered! The relation between this and the practice of keeping a journal is obvious.... If each one would employ a certain portion of each day in looking back upon the time which has passed, and in writing down his thoughts and feelings, in reckoning up his daily gains, that he may be able to detect whatever false coins may have crept into his coffers, and, as it were, in settling accounts with his mind,--not only would his daily experience be greatly increased, since his feelings and ideas would thus be more clearly defined,--but he would be ready to turn over a new leaf (having carefully perused the preceding one) and would not continue to glance carelessly over the same page, without being able to distinguish it from a new one." This is ingenious, quaint, and mercantile, bespeaking the hereditary bent of his family to trade and orderly accounts; but what follows in the same essay is more to the purpose, as striking the key-note of Thoreau's whole after-life. He adds:-- "Most of us are apt to neglect the study of our own characters, thoughts, and feelings, and, for the purpose of forming our own minds, look to others, _who should merely be considered as different editions of the same great work_. To be sure, it would be well for us to examine the various copies, that we might detect any errors; yet it would be foolish for one _to borrow a work which he possessed himself, but had not perused_." The earliest record of the day's observations which I find is dated a few months later than this (April 20, 1835), when Henry Thoreau was not quite eighteen, and relates to the beauties of nature. The first passage describes a Sunday prospect from the garret window of his father's house, (afterwards the residence of Mr. William Munroe, the benefactor of the Concord Library), on the main street of the village. He writes:-- "'Twas always my delight to monopolize the little Gothic window which overlooked the kitchen-garden, particularly of a Sabbath afternoon; when all around was quiet, and Nature herself was taking her afternoon nap,--when the last peal of the bell in the neighboring steeple, 'Swinging slow with sullen roar,' had 'left the vale to _solitude_ and _me_,' and the very air scarcely dared breathe, lest it should disturb the universal calm. Then did I use, with eyes upturned, to gaze upon the clouds, and, allowing my imagination to wander, search for flaws in their rich drapery, that I might get a peep at that world beyond, which they seem intended to veil from our view. Now is my attention engaged by a truant hawk, as, like a messenger from those ethereal regions, he issues from the bosom of a cloud, and, at first a mere speck in the distance, comes circling onward, exploring every seeming creek, and rounding every jutting precipice. And now, his mission ended, what can be more majestic than his stately flight, as he wheels around some towering pine, enveloped in a cloud of smaller birds that have united to expel him from their premises." The second passage, under the same date, seems to describe earlier and repeated visits, made by his elder brother John and himself, to a hill which was always a favorite resort of Thoreau's, Fairhaven Cliffs, overlooking the river-bay, known as "Fairhaven," a mile or two up the river from Concord village toward Sudbury:-- "In the freshness of the dawn my brother and I were ever ready to enjoy a stroll to a certain cliff, distant a mile or more, where we were wont to climb to the highest peak, and seating ourselves on some rocky platform, catch the first ray of the morning sun, as it gleamed upon the smooth, still river, wandering in sullen silence far below. The approach to the precipice is by no means calculated to prepare one for the glorious _dénouement_ at hand. After following for some time a delightful path that winds through the woods, occasionally crossing a rippling brook, and not forgetting to visit a sylvan dell, whose solitude is made audible by the unwearied tinkling of a crystal spring,--you suddenly emerge from the trees upon a flat and mossy rock, which forms the summit of a beetling crag. The feelings which come over one on first beholding this freak of nature are indescribable. The giddy height, the iron-bound rock, the boundless horizon open around, and the beautiful river at your feet, with its green and sloping banks, fringed with trees and shrubs of every description, are calculated to excite in the beholder emotions of no common occurrence,--to inspire him with noble and sublime emotions. The eye wanders over the broad and seemingly compact surface of the slumbering forest on the opposite side of the stream, and catches an occasional glimpse of a little farm-house, 'resting in a green hollow, and lapped in the bosom of plenty;' while a gentle swell of the river, a rustic, and fortunately rather old-looking bridge on the right, with the cloudlike Wachusett in the distance, give a finish and beauty to the landscape, that is rarely to be met with even in our own fair land. This interesting spot, if we may believe tradition, was the favorite haunt of the red man, before the axe of his pale-faced visitor had laid low its loftier honors, or his 'strong water' had wasted the energies of the race." Here we have a touch of fine writing, natural in a boy who had read Irving and Goldsmith, and exaggerating a little the dimensions of the rocks and rills of which he wrote. But how smooth the flow of description, how well-placed the words, how sure and keen the eye of the young observer! To this mount of vision did Thoreau and his friends constantly resort in after years, and it was on the plateau beneath that Mr. Alcott, in 1843, was about to cut down the woods and build his Paradise, when a less inviting fate, as he thought, beckoned his English friend Lane and himself to "Fruitlands," in the distant town of Harvard. At some time after this, perhaps while Thoreau was encamped at Walden with his books and his flute, Mr. Emerson sent him the following note, which gives us now a glimpse into that Arcadia:-- "Will you not come up to the Cliff this P. M., at any hour convenient to you, where our ladies will be greatly gratified to see you? and the more, they say, if you will bring your flute for the echo's sake, though now the wind blows. "R. W. E. "Monday, 1 o'clock P. M." It does not appear that Thoreau wrote verses at this time, though he was a great reader of the best poetry,--of Milton very early, and with constant admiration and quotation. Thus, in a college essay of 1835, on "Simplicity of Style," he has this passage concerning the Bible and Milton:-- "The most sublime and noblest precepts may be conveyed in a plain and simple strain. The Scriptures afford abundant proof of this. What images can be more natural, what sentiments of greater weight and at the same time more noble and exalted than those with which they abound? They possess no local or relative ornament which may be lost in a translation; clothed in whatever dress, they still retain their peculiar beauties. Here is simplicity itself. Every one allows this, every one admires it, yet how few attain to it! The union of wisdom and simplicity is plainly hinted at in the following lines of Milton:-- "Suspicion sleeps At Wisdom's gate, and to _Simplicity_ Resigns her charge.'" Early in 1837 Thoreau wrote an elaborate paper, though of no great length, on Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," with many quotations, in course of which he said:-- "These poems place Milton in an entirely new and extremely pleasing light to the reader, who was previously familiar with him as the author of 'Paradise Lost' alone. If before he venerated, he may now admire and love him. The immortal Milton seems for a space to have put on mortality,--to have snatched a moment from the weightier cares of Heaven and Hell, to wander for a while among the sons of men.... I have dwelt upon the poet's beauties and not so much as glanced at his blemishes. A pleasing image, or a fine sentiment loses none of its charms, though Burton, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Marlowe, or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written something very similar,--or even in another connection, may have used the identical word, whose aptness we so much admire. That always appeared to me a contemptible kind of criticism which, deliberately and in cold blood, can dissect the sublimest passage, and take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incongruities; when applied to Milton, it is little better than sacrilege." The moral view taken by the young collegian in these essays is quite as interesting as the literary opinions, or the ease of his style. In September, 1835, discussing punishments, he says:-- "Certainty is more effectual than severity of punishment. No man will deliberately cut his own fingers. Some have asked, 'Cannot reward be substituted for punishment? Is hope a less powerful incentive to action than fear? When a political pharmacopoeia has the command of both ingredients, wherefore employ the bitter instead of the sweet?' This reasoning is absurd. Does a man deserve to be rewarded for refraining from murder? Is the greatest virtue merely negative? or does it rather consist in the performance of a thousand every-day duties, hidden from the eye of the world?" In an essay on the effect of story-telling, written in 1836, he says:-- "The story of the world never ceases to interest. The child enchanted by the melodies of Mother Goose, the scholar pondering 'the tale of Troy divine,' and the historian breathing the atmosphere of past ages,--all manifest the same passion, are alike the creatures of curiosity. The same passion for the novel (somewhat modified, to be sure), that is manifested in our early days, leads us, in after-life, when the sprightliness and credulity of youth have given way to the reserve and skepticism of manhood, to the more serious, though scarcely less wonderful annals of the world. The love of stories and of story-telling cherishes a purity of heart, a frankness and candor of disposition, a respect for what is generous and elevated, a contempt for what is mean and dishonorable, and tends to multiply merry companions and never-failing friends." In March, 1837, in an essay on the source of our feeling of the sublime, Thoreau says:-- "The emotion excited by the sublime is the most unearthly and god-like we mortals experience. It depends for the peculiar strength with which it takes hold on and occupies the mind, upon a principle which lies at the foundation of that worship which we pay to the Creator himself. And is fear the foundation of that worship? Is fear the ruling principle of our religion? Is it not rather the mother of superstition? Yes, that principle which prompts us to pay an involuntary homage to the infinite, the incomprehensible, the sublime, forms the very basis of our religion. It is a principle implanted in us by our Maker, a part of our very selves; we cannot eradicate it, we cannot resist it; fear may be overcome, death may be despised; but the infinite, the sublime seize upon the soul and disarm it. We may overlook them, or rather fall short of them; we may pass them by, but, so sure as we meet them face to face, we yield." Speaking of national characteristics, he says:-- "It is not a little curious to observe how man, the boasted lord of creation, is the slave of a name, a mere sound. How much mischief have those magical words, North, South, East, and West caused! Could we rest satisfied with one mighty, all-embracing West, leaving the other three cardinal points to the Old World, methinks we should not have cause for so much apprehension about the preservation of the Union." (This was written in February, 1837.) Before he had reached the age of nineteen he thus declared his independence of foreign opinion, while asserting its general sway over American literature, in 1836:-- "We are, as it were, but colonies. True, we have declared our independence, and gained our liberty, but we have dissolved only the political bands which connected us with Great Britain; though we have rejected her tea, she still supplies us with food for the mind. The aspirant to fame must breathe the atmosphere of foreign parts, and learn to talk about things which the homebred student never dreamed of, if he would have his talents appreciated or his opinion regarded by his countrymen. Ours are authors of the day, they bid fair to outlive their works; they are too fashionable to write for posterity. True, there are some amongst us, who can contemplate the babbling brook, without, in imagination, polluting its waters with a mill-wheel; but even they are prone to sing of skylarks and nightingales perched on hedges, to the neglect of the homely robin-redbreast and the straggling rail-fences of their own native land." So early did he take this position, from which he never varied. In May, 1837, we find another note of his opening life, in an essay on Paley's "Common Reasons." He says:-- "Man does not wantonly rend the meanest tie that binds him to his fellows; he would not stand aloof, even in his prejudices, did not the stern demands of truth require it. He is ready enough to float with the tide, and when he does stem the current of popular opinion, sincerity, at least, must nerve his arm. He has not only the burden of proof, but that of reproof to support. We may call him a fanatic, an enthusiast; but these are titles of honor; they signify the devotion and entire surrendering of himself to his cause. So far as my experience goes, man _never_ seriously maintained an objectionable principle, doctrine, or theory; error _never_ had a sincere defender; her disciples were _never_ enthusiasts. This is strong language, I confess, but I do not rashly make use of it. We are told that 'to err is human,' but I would rather call it inhuman, if I may use the word in this sense. I speak not of those errors that have to do with facts and occurrences, but rather, errors of judgment." Here we have that bold generalization and that calm love of paradox which mark his later style. The lofty imagination was always his, too, as where this youth of nineteen says in the same essay:-- "Mystery is yet afar off,--it is but a cloud in the distance, whose shadow, as it flits across the landscape, gives a pleasing variety to the scene. But as the perfect day approaches, its morning light discovers the dark and straggling clouds, which at first skirted the horizon, assembling as at a signal, and as they expand and multiply, rolling slowly onward to the zenith, till, at last, the whole heavens, if we except a faint glimmering in the East, are overshadowed." What a confident and flowing movement of thought is here! like the prose of Milton or Jeremy Taylor, but with a more restrained energy. "Duty," writes the young moralist in another essay of 1837, "is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity; so far as it exists, it is binding; and, if all duties are binding, so as on no account to be neglected, how can one bind stronger than another?" "None but the highest minds can attain to moral excellence. With by far the greater part of mankind religion is a habit; or rather habit is religion. However paradoxical it may seem, it appears to me that to reject _religion_ is the first step towards moral excellence; at least no man ever attained to the highest degree of the latter by any other road. Could infidels live double the number of years allotted to other mortals, they would become patterns of excellence. So, too, of all true poets,--they would neglect the beautiful for the true." I suspect that Thoreau's first poems date from the year 1836-37, since the "big red journal," in which they were copied, was begun in October, 1837. The verses entitled, "To the Maiden in the East," were by no means among the first, which date from 1836 or earlier; but near these in time was that poem called "Sympathy," which was the first of his writings to appear in Mr. Emerson's "Dial." These last were addressed, we are told, to Ellen Sewall, with whom, the legend says, both Henry and John Thoreau were in love. Few of these poems show any imitation of Mr. Emerson, whose own verses at that time were mostly unpublished, though he sometimes read them in private to his friends. But like most of Thoreau's verses, these indicate a close familiarity with the Elizabethan literature, and what directly followed it, in the time of the Stuarts. The measure of "Sympathy" was that of Davenant's "Gondibert," which Thoreau, almost alone of his contemporaries, had read; the thought was above Davenant, and ranged with Raleigh and Spenser. These verses will not soon be forgotten:-- "Lately, alas! I knew a gentle boy, Whose features all were cast in Virtue's mould, As one she had designed for Beauty's toy, But after manned him for her own stronghold. "Say not that Cæsar was victorious, With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame; In other sense this youth was glorious, Himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came. * * * * * "Eternity may not the chance repeat, But I must tread my single way alone, In sad remembrance that we once did meet, And know that bliss irrevocably gone. "The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, For elegy has other subject none; Each strain of music in my ears shall ring Knell of departure from that other one. * * * * * "Is't then too late the damage to repair? Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, But in my hands the wheat and kernel left. "If I but love that virtue which he is, Though it be scented in the morning air, Still shall we be dearest acquaintances, Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare." The other poem seems to have been written later than the separation of which that one so loftily speaks; and it vibrates with a tenderer chord than sympathy. It begins,-- "Low in the eastern sky Is set thy glancing eye," and then it goes on with the picture of lover-like things,--the thrushes and the flowers, until, he says, "The trees a welcome waved, And lakes their margin laved, When thy free mind To my retreat did wind." Then comes the Persian dialect of high love:-- "It was a summer eve,-- The air did gently heave, While yet a low-hung cloud Thy eastern skies did shroud; The lightning's silent gleam Startling my drowsy dream, _Seemed like the flash Under thy dark eyelash_. * * * * * "I'll be thy Mercury, Thou, Cytherea to me,-- _Distinguished by thy face The earth shall learn my place_. As near beneath thy light Will I outwear the night, With mingled ray Leading the westward way." "Let us," said Hafiz, "break up the tiresome roof of heaven into new forms,"--and with as bold a flight did this young poet pass to his "stellar duties." Then dropping to the Concord meadow again, like the tuneful lark, he chose a less celestial path "Of gentle slope and wide, As thou wert by my side; I'll walk with gentle pace, And choose the smoothest place, And careful dip the oar, And shun the winding shore, And gently steer my boat Where water-lilies float, And cardinal flowers Stand in their sylvan bowers." A frivolous question has sometimes been raised whether the young Thoreau knew what love was, like the Sicilian shepherd, who found him a native of the rocks, a lion's whelp. With his poet-nature, he early gathered this experience, and passed on; praising afterwards the lion's nature in the universal god:-- "Implacable is Love,-- Foes may be bought or teased From their hostile intent,-- But he goes unappeased Who is on kindness bent. "There's nothing in the world, I know, That can escape from Love, For every depth it goes below, And every height above." The Red Journal of five hundred and ninety-six long pages, in which the early verses occur, was the first collection of Thoreau's systematic diarizing. It ran on from October, 1837, to June, 1840, and was succeeded by another journal of three hundred and ninety-six pages, which was finished early in 1841. He wrote his first lecture (on Society) in March, 1838, and read it before the Concord Lyceum in the Freemasons' Hall, April 11, 1838. In the December following he wrote a memorable essay on "Sound and Silence," and in February, 1840, wrote his "first printed paper of consequence," as he says, on "Aulus Persius Flaccus." The best of the early verses seem to have been written in 1836-41. His contributions to the "Dial," which he helped edit, were taken from his journals, and ran through nearly every number from July, 1840, to April, 1844, when that magazine ceased. For these papers he received nothing but the thanks of Emerson and the praise of a few readers. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in February, 1843, wrote to Thoreau, that "the regular income of the 'Dial' does not pay the cost of its printing and paper; yet there are readers enough to support it, if they would only subscribe; and they will subscribe, if they are convinced that only by doing so can they secure its continuance." They did not subscribe, and in the spring of 1844 it came to an end. In 1842 Thoreau took a walk to Wachusett, his nearest mountain, and the journal of this excursion was printed in the "Boston Miscellany" of 1843. In it occurred the verses, written at least as early as 1841, in which he addresses the mountains of his horizon, Monadnoc, Wachusett, and the Peterborough Hills of New Hampshire. These verses were for some time in the hands of Margaret Fuller, for publication in the "Dial," if she saw fit, but she returned them with the following characteristic letter,--the first addressed by her to Thoreau:-- "[CONCORD] _18th October, 1841_. "I do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less, and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of woman. I cannot define my position here, and a large class of readers would differ from me. As the poet goes on to-- "Unhewn primeval timber, For knees so stiff, for masts so limber." he seems to chase an image, already rather forced, into conceits. "Yet, now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines (with the exception of such offenses against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye, as to which we are already agreed), which I would not make to himself. He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature; he is not willfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of Spring have not visited. Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail; we can number and mark the substances imbedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present, unless to tame the guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid his native snows. He is friendly; he will find the generous office that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather. "The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, will mould the man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, 'He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine.' She is not yours till you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently, all places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false. "I do not know that I have more to say now; perhaps these words will say nothing to you. If intercourse should continue, perhaps a bridge may be made between two minds so widely apart; for I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me so widely as most of your kind do. If you should find yourself inclined to write to me, as you thought you might, I dare say, many thoughts would be suggested to me; many have already, by seeing you from day to day. Will you finish the poem in your own way, and send it for the 'Dial'? Leave out "And seem to milk the sky." The image is too low; Mr. Emerson thought so too. "Farewell! May truth be irradiated by Beauty! Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut,[8] and write to me about Shakespeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him, which I have never yet been led to express. "MARGARET F. "The penciled paper Mr. E. put into my hands. I have taken the liberty to copy it. You expressed one day my own opinion,--that the moment such a crisis is passed, we may speak of it. There is no need of artificial delicacy, of secrecy; it keeps its own secrets; it cannot be made false. Thus you will not be sorry that I have seen the paper. Will you not send me some other records of the _good week_?" "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." This searching criticism would not offend Thoreau; nor yet the plainness with which the same tongue told the faults of a prose paper--perhaps "The Service,"--which Margaret rejected in this note:-- "[CONCORD] _1st December (1841)_. "I am to blame for so long detaining your manuscript. But my thoughts have been so engaged that I have not found a suitable hour to reread it as I wished, till last night. This second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be _pained_ not to meet it again. But then, the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without _pain_. I never once feel myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic. It is true, as Mr. Emerson says, that essays not to be compared with this have found their way into the 'Dial.' But then, these are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding, which induces us to permit their presence. Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding." These were the years of Thoreau's apprenticeship in literature, and many were the tasks and mortifications he must endure before he became a master of the writer's art. CHAPTER VII. FRIENDS AND COMPANIONS. "Margaret Fuller," says William Henry Channing, "was indeed The Friend; this was her vocation." It was no less the vocation of Thoreau, though in a more lofty, unvarying, and serene manner. "Literally," says the friend who best knew him, "his views of friendship were high and noble. Those who loved him never had the least reason to regret it. He made no useless professions, never asked one of those questions that destroy all relation; but he was on the spot at the time, and had so much of human life in his keeping to the last, that he could spare a breathing-place for a friend. He meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it without the slightest abatement; not veering as a weathercock with each shift of a friend's fortune, nor like those who bury their early friendships, in order to make room for fresh corpses." It is, therefore, impossible to sketch him by himself. He could have said, with Ellery Channing,-- "O band of Friends, ye breathe within this space, And the rough finish of a humble man By your kind touches rises into art." His earliest companion was his brother John, "a flowing generous spirit," as one described him, for whom his younger brother never ceased to grieve. Walking among the Cohasset rocks and looking at the scores of shipwrecked men from the Irish brig St. John, in 1849, he said, "A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but one corpse." With him it was the funeral of John Thoreau in February, 1842. They had made the voyage of the Concord and Merrimac together, in 1839; they had walked and labored together, and invented Indian names for one another from boyhood. John was "Sachem Hopeful of Hopewell,"--a sunny soul, always serene and loving. When publishing his first book, in 1849, Henry dedicated it to this brother, with the simple verse-- "Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me, Though now thou climbest loftier mounts, And fairer rivers dost ascend, Be thou my Muse, my Brother John." John Thoreau's death was singular and painful; his brother could not speak of it without physical suffering, so that when he related it to his friend Ricketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to go to the door for air. This was the only time Mr. Ricketson ever saw him show deep emotion. His sister Sophia once said:-- "Henry rarely spoke of dear John; it pained him too much. He sent the following verses from Staten Island in May, 1843, the year after John's death, in a letter to Helen. You will see that they apply to himself:"-- "Brother, where dost thou dwell? What sun shines for thee now? Dost thou, indeed, fare well, As we wished here below? "What season didst thou find? 'T was winter here. Are not the Fates more kind Than they appear? "Is thy brow clear again, As in thy youthful years? And was that ugly pain The summit of thy fears? "Yet thou wast cheery still; They could not quench thy fire; Thou didst abide their will, And then retire. "Where chiefly shall I look To feel thy presence near? Along the neighboring brook May I thy voice still hear? "Dost thou still haunt the brink Of yonder river's tide? And may I ever think That thou art by my side? "What bird wilt thou employ To bring me word of thee? For it would give them joy,-- 'T would give them liberty, To serve their former lord With wing and minstrelsy. "A sadder strain mixed with their song, They've slowlier built their nests; Since thou art gone Their lively labor rests. "Where is the finch, the thrush I used to hear? Ah, they could well abide The dying year. "Now they no more return, I hear them not; They have remained to mourn; Or else forgot." Before the death of his brother, Thoreau had formed the friendship with Ellery Channing, that was in some degree to replace the daily intimacy he had enjoyed with John Thoreau. This man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make genius an unhappy boon, was a year younger than Thoreau when he came, in 1843, to dwell in Concord with his bride, a younger sister of Margaret Fuller. They lived first in a cottage near Mr. Emerson's, Thoreau being at that time an inmate of Mr. Emerson's household; afterwards, in 1843, Mr. Channing removed to a hill-top some miles away, then to New York in 1844-45, then to Europe for a few months, and finally to a house on the main street of the village, opposite the last residence of the Thoreau family, where Henry lived from 1850 till his death in 1862. In the garden of Mr. Channing's house, which lay on the river, Thoreau kept his boat, under a group of willows, and from that friendly harbor all his later voyages were made. At times they talked of occupying this house together. "I have an old house and a garden patch," said Channing, "you have legs and arms, and we both need each other's companionship. These miserable cracks and crannies which have made the wall of life look thin and fungus-like, will be cemented by the sweet and solid mortar of friendship." They did in fact associate more closely than if they had lived in the same house. At the age of thirty-seven, when contemplating a removal from the neighborhood of his friend Thoreau, this humorous man of letters thus described himself and his tastes to another friend:-- "I am a poet, or of a poetical temper or mood, with a very limited income both of brains and of moneys. This world is rather a sour world. But as I am, equally with you, an admirer of Cowper, why should I not prove a sort of unnecessary addition to your neighborhood possibly? I may leave Concord, and my aim would be to get a small place, in the vicinity of a large town, with some land, and, if possible, near to some _one_ person with whom I might in some measure fraternize. Come, my neighbor! thou hast now a new occupation, the setting up of a poet and literary man,--one who loves old books, old garrets, old wines, old pipes, and (last not least) Cowper. We might pass the winter in comparing _variorum_ editions of our favorite authors, and the summer in walking and horticulture. This is a grand scheme of life. All it requires is the house of which I spake. I think one in middle life feels averse to change, and especially to local change. The Lares and Penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving. But the fatal hour may come, when, bidding one long, one last adieu to those weather-beaten Penates, we sally forth with Don Quixote, once more to strike our lances into some new truth, or life, or man." This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship" was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin. When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered, "with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is better some things should end." Of their earlier friendship, and of Channing's poetic gift, so admirable, yet so little appreciated by his contemporaries, this mention occurs in a letter written by Thoreau in March, 1856:-- "I was surprised to hear the other day that Channing was in X. When he was here last (in December, I think), he said, like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he lived, 'that he did not know the name of the place;' so it has remained in a degree of obscurity to me. I am rejoiced to hear that you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. He and I, as you know, have been old cronies,-- "'Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill, Together both, ere the high lawns appeared Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield, and both together heared,' etc. "'But O, the heavy change,' now he is gone. The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most that you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be 'reserved and enigmatic,' and you must deal with him at arm's length. I have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. Nor need I suggest how witty and poetic he is,--and what an inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship you will find in him." In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or three miles away from the hermitage. "He who came from farthest to my lodge," says Thoreau, "through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours; even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,--making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest." In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse, he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the latter,-- "On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay, Down this still stream we took our meadowy way, A poet wise hath settled whose fine ray Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day. Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, Shining more brightly as the day goes by, Most travelers cannot at first descry, But eyes that wont to range the evening sky." These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this neglected poet said:-- "Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray. _There is no other test_ of the value of poetry, but its popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called verses; but they are not good,--they are wholly unknown and unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than nothing,--and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented S. with the last set of those little books there is, to have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary _curio_, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking, 'How could ever I have liked these?'" Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,-- "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea,"-- and who cried to his companions,-- "Ye heavy-hearted mariners Who sail this shore,-- Ye patient, ye who labor, Sitting at the sweeping oar, And see afar the flashing sea-gulls play On the free waters, and the glad bright day Twine with his hand the spray,-- From out your dreariness, From your heart-weariness, I speak, for I am yours On these gray shores." It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to his friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing thus addressed him:-- "Modest and mild and kind, Who never spurned the needing from thy door-- (Door of thy heart, which is a palace-gate); Temperate and faithful,--in whose word the world Might trust, sure to repay; unvexed by care, Unawed by Fortune's nod, slave to no lord, Nor coward to thy peers,--long shalt thou live! Not in this feeble verse, this sleeping age,-- But in the roll of Heaven, and at the bar Of that high court where Virtue is in place, There thou shalt fitly rule, and read the laws Of that supremer state,--writ Jove's behest, And even old Saturn's chronicle; Works ne'er Hesiod saw,--types of all things, And portraitures of all--whose golden leaves, Roll back the ages' doors, and summon up Unsleeping truths, by which wheels on Heaven's prime." In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley, he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been constant. "If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of all human privileges," he said one day, after returning from an evening spent at Walden with Thoreau, "it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To most, the presence of such is painfully irksome; they are lovers of present reputation, and not of that exaltation of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau; and the evenings passed in their society during these winter months have realized my conception of what friendship, when great and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects." Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long winter evenings with him in the hut:-- "One of the last of the philosophers," he writes in "Walden,"--"Connecticut gave him to the world,--he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,--the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_. Great Looker! great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of,--we three,--it expanded and racked my little house." Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem, at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt Whitman in Brooklyn the same year. Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of 1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after his marriage in 1842:-- "There in the old gray house, whose end we see Half peeping through the golden willow's veil, Whose graceful twigs make foliage through the year, My Hawthorne dwelt, a scholar of rare worth, The gentlest man that kindly nature drew; New England's Chaucer, Hawthorne fitly lives. His tall, compacted figure, ably strung To urge the Indian chase or guide the way, Softly reclining 'neath the aged elm, Like some still rock looked out upon the scene, As much a part of nature as itself." In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire mountains, Thoreau said:-- "Mr. Hawthorne has come home. I went to meet him the other evening (at Mr. Emerson's), and found that he had not altered, except that he was looking pretty brown after his voyage. He is as simple and childlike as ever." This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad, in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish church near by. Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate, of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island. In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on "the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this occasion--Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty--all these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H. Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates of Harvard a year before Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except Alcott were Cambridge scholars,--for Margaret Fuller, without entering college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the "Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ." This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record of his friendships, and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was made public:-- "This evening I pass with Thoreau at his hermitage on Walden, and he reads me some passages from his manuscript volume, entitled 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers.' The book is purely American, fragrant with the life of New England woods and streams, and could have been written nowhere else. Especially am I touched by his sufficiency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor,--as if a man had once more come into Nature who knew what Nature meant him to do with her,--Virgil, and White of Selborne, and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all in one. I came home at midnight, through the woody snow-paths, and slept with the pleasing dream that presently the press would give me two books to be proud of--Emerson's 'Poems,' and Thoreau's 'Week.'" This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr. Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic," and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which, nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April 20, 1848, and said:-- "I find Chapman very anxious to publish a journal common to Old and New England, as was long ago proposed. Froude and Clough and other Oxonians would gladly conspire. Let the 'Massachusetts Quarterly' give place to this, and we should have two legs, and bestride the sea. Here I know so many good-minded people that I am sure will gladly combine. But what do I, or does any friend of mine in America care for a journal? Not enough, I fear, to secure an energetic work on that side. I have a letter from Cabot lately and do write him to-day. 'Tis certain the Massachusetts 'Quarterly Review' will fail, unless Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and Channing and Newcome, the fourfold visages, fly to the rescue. I am sorry that Alcott's editor, the Dumont of our Bentham, the Baruch of our Jeremiah, is so slow to be born." In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing, at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr. Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9] Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr. Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his diary an incident not unusual in the town:-- "Our friend the fugitive, who has shared now a week's hospitalities with us (sawing and piling my wood), feels this new trust of Freedom yet unsafe here in New England, and so has left us this morning for Canada. We supplied him with the means of journeying, and bade him Godspeed to a freer land. His stay with us has given image and a name to the dire entity of slavery." It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's Walden hut. My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came, directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from my native town, as follows:-- "HAMPTON FALLS, N. H., _Jan'y_ 30th, '55. "MY DEAR SIR,--I have had it in mind to write you a letter ever since the day when you visited me, without my knowing it, at Cambridge. I saw you afterward at the Library, but refrained from introducing myself to you, in the hope that I should see you later in the day. But as I did not, will you allow me to seek you out, when next I come to Concord? "The author of the criticism in the 'Harvard Magazine' is Mr. Morton of Plymouth, a friend and pupil of your friend, Marston Watson, of that old town. Accordingly I gave him the book which you left with me, judging that it belonged to him. He received it with delight, as a gift of value in itself, and the more valuable for the sake of the giver. "We who at Cambridge look toward Concord as a sort of Mecca for our pilgrimages, are glad to see that your last book finds such favor with the public. It has made its way where your name has rarely been heard before, and the inquiry, 'Who is Mr. Thoreau?' proves that the book has in part done its work. For my own part, I thank you for the new light it shows me the aspects of Nature in, and for the marvelous beauty of your descriptions. At the same time, if any one should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be apt to answer that it is not worth a straw. Whenever again you visit Cambridge, be assured, sir, that it would give me much pleasure to see you at my room. There, or in Concord, I hope soon to see you; if I may intrude so much on your time. "Believe me always, yours very truly, "F. B. SANBORN." This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's. I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief note of his appearance:-- "To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek--which he thought ought to be studied--and about other things. In his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson, so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said many good things. He looks like Emerson, too,--coarser, but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E. has. Thoreau looks eminently _sagacious_--like a sort of wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his throat, and has a brown complexion." A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with other particulars:-- "He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest animal's--some retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson" [we young collegians then wearing ours upright], "and often an old dress-coat, broad in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired." Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In 1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in 1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him the stanchest of friends. This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with them, at least on his own side. "A truth-speaker he," said Emerson at his funeral, "capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." CHAPTER VIII. THE WALDEN HERMITAGE. It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly the scenes and events of his sylvan life,--his days and nights with Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often coming forth from it. The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,--though it would be hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any place which is not neighbor either to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet, "That like an arrowe clear Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"-- to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,-- "Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds." He gave beauty and dignity to obscure places by his mention of them; and it is curious that the neighborhood of Walden,--now the most romantic and poetical region of Concord, associated in every mind with this tender lover of Nature, and his worship of her,--was anciently a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters, such as fringed the sober garment of many a New England village in Puritanic times. Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where, in the early days of emancipation in Massachusetts, the newly freed slaves of Concord magnates took up their abode,-- "The wrathful kings on cairns apart," as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham, freedman of 'Squire Duncan Ingraham, who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard, on the day of Concord fight, was brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn, then something the worse for 'Squire Ingraham's wine, and ordered to "lay down his arms and disperse," as the rebels at Lexington had been six hours earlier. Here also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun linen, and made the Walden Woods resound with her shrill singing:-- "Dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos Assiduo resonat cantu, tectisque superbis Urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum, Arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas." But some paroled English prisoners in the War of 1812, burnt down her proud abode, with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens, while Zilpha was absent. Down the road towards the village from Cato's farm and Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived Brister Freeman, who gave his name to the hill,--Scipio Brister, "a handy negro," once the slave of 'Squire Cummings, but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's boyhood set free again by death, and buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near the ancestor of President Garfield, but still nearer the unmarked graves of British grenadiers, who fell in the retreat from Concord. With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus, in the edge of the Walden Woods, "dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly--large, round, and black,--such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord, before or since," says Thoreau. Such was the African colony on the south side of Concord village among the woods, while on the northern edge of the village, along the Great Meadows, there dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins, whose descendants still flit about the town. Older than all was the illustrious Guinea negro, John Jack, once a slave on the farm which is now the glebe of the Old Manse, but who purchased his freedom about the time the Old Manse was built in 1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph, written by Daniel Bliss, the young Tory brother of the first mistress of the manse (Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother of Emerson, the poet):-- "_God wills us free, Man wills us slaves, I will as God wills: God's will be done._ Here lies the body of JOHN JACK, A native of Africa, who died March, 1773, aged about sixty years. Though born in a land of slavery, He was born free; Though he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave; Till by his honest though stolen labors He acquired the source of slavery Which gave him his freedom; Though not long before Death the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And put him on a footing with kings. Though a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves." This epitaph, and the anecdote already given concerning Cæsar Robbins, may illustrate the humanity and humor with which the freedmen of Concord were regarded, while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in his early days of freedom, may show the mixture of savage fun and contempt that also followed them, and which some of their conduct may have deserved. The village drover and butcher once had a ferocious bull to kill, and when he had succeeded with some difficulty in driving him into his slaughter-house, on the Walden road, nobody was willing to go in and kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from his hill near Walden, came along the road, and was slyly invited by the butcher to go into the slaughter-house for an axe,--being told that when he brought it he should have a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman opened the door and walked in; it was shut behind him, and he found the bull drawn up in line of battle before him. After some pursuit and retreat in the narrow arena, Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began attacking his pursuer, giving him a blow here or there as he had opportunity. His employers outside watched the bull-fight through a hole in the building, and cheered on the matador with shouts and laughter. At length, by a fortunate stroke, the African conquered, the bull fell, and his slayer threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt. But his tormentors declared "he was no longer the dim, sombre negro he went in, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool straightened out and standing erect on his head." Without waiting to be identified, or to receive pay for his work, Brister, affrighted and wrathful, withdrew to the wooded hill and to the companionship of his fortune-telling Fenda, who had not foreseen the hazard of her spouse. It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town "poor-farm" and poor-house,--the last retreat of these straggling soldiers of fortune,--that Thoreau went toward the village jail from his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn, but I never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the former denizens of the Walden woods--votaries of Bacchus and Apollo, and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,--like Giordano Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,-- "_Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco, Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco_." It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter VI.), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr. Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had bought land on both sides of Walden Pond. How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5, 1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr. Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his cabin. Channing writes:-- "I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else. Concord is just as good a place as any other; there are, indeed, more people in the streets of that village than in the streets of this." [He was writing from the Tribune Office, in New York.] "This is a singularly muddy town; muddy, solitary, and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words to me about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau might be something, if he would only take a journey through the Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G--,' said the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about nothing? and that nutmeg-grater of a Z. yet shriek about nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you philosophers.'" Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau, which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person Channing adds:-- "I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka occasionally; my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale. In addition to this I find that my corresponding members at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear occasionally from the World; everything seems to be promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine, taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without necessity." It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing said, soon after his friend's death,-- "The fact that our author lived for a while alone in a shanty, near a pond, and named one of his books after the place where it stood, has led some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope. It was a writing-case; here in this wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his famous 'Walden,' and this solitary woodland pool was more to his Muse than all oceans of the planet, by the force of imagination. Some have fancied, because he moved to Walden, he left his family. He bivouacked there and really lived at home, where he went every day." This last is not literally true, for he was sometimes secluded in his hut for days together; but he remained as social at Walden as he had been while an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again in 1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He, in fact, as he says himself,-- "Went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived." In another place he says he went to Walden to "transact some private business," and this he did to good purpose. He edited there his "Week," some portions of which had appeared in the "Dial" from 1840 to 1844, but which was not published as a volume until 1849, although he had made many attempts to issue it earlier. It was at Walden, also, that he wrote his essay on Carlyle, which was first published in "Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in 1847, through the good offices of Horace Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter. Thoreau's hermit life was not, then, merely a protest against the luxury and the restraints of society, nor yet an austere discipline such as monks and saints have imposed upon themselves for their souls' good. "My purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles." He lived a life of labor and study in his hut. Emerson says, "as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it." He had edited his first book there; had satisfied himself that he was fit to be an author, and had passed his first examinations; then he graduated from that gymnasium as another young student might from the medical college or the polytechnic school. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there." His abandoned hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener, Hugh Whelan by name, who removed it some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few years. Then it was bought by a farmer, who put it on wheels and carried it three miles northward, toward the entry of the Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle road, where it stood till after Thoreau's death,--a shelter for corn and beans, and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The wood-cut representing the hermitage in the first edition of "Walden," is from a sketch made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact than that given in Page's "Life of Thoreau," but in neither picture are the trees accurately drawn. On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in height as each friend of his muse adds a stone from the shore of the fair water he loved so well. "Beat with thy paddle on the boat Midway the lake,--the wood repeats The ordered blow; the echoing note Is ended in thy ear; yet its retreats Conceal Time's possibilities; And in this Man the nature lies Of woods so green, And lakes so sheen, And hermitages edged between. And I may tell you that the Man was good, Never did his neighbor harm,-- Sweet was it where he stood, Sunny and warm; Like the seat beneath a pine That winter suns have cleared away With their yellow tine,-- Red-cushioned and tasseled with the day." The events and thoughts of Thoreau's life at Walden may be read in his book of that name. As a protest against society, that life was ineffectual,--as the communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands had proved to be; and as the Fourierite phalansteries, in which Horace Greeley interested himself, were destined to be. In one sense, all these were failures; but in Thoreau's case the failure was slight, the discipline and experience gained were invaluable. He never regretted it, and the Walden episode in his career has made him better known than anything else. CHAPTER IX. HORACE IN THE RÔLE OF MÆCENAS. In a letter to his sister Sophia, July 21, 1843, written from Mr. William Emerson's house at Staten Island, Thoreau says:-- "In New York I have seen, since I wrote last, Horace Greeley, editor of the 'Tribune,' who is cheerfully in earnest at his office of all work,--a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet,--and says, 'Now be neighborly.' He believes only or mainly, first in the Sylvania Association, somewhere in Pennsylvania; and secondly, and most of all, in a new association, to go into operation soon in New Jersey, with which he is connected." This was the "Phalanstery" at which W. H. Channing afterward preached. A fortnight later, Thoreau writes to Mr. Emerson:-- "I have had a pleasant talk with W. H. Channing; and Greeley, too, it was refreshing to meet. They were both much pleased with your criticism on Carlyle, but thought that you had overlooked what chiefly concerned them in the book,--its practical aims and merits." This refers to the notice of Carlyle's "Past and Present," in the "Dial" for July, 1843, and shows that Mr. Greeley was a quick reader of that magazine, as Thoreau always was of the "New York Tribune." From this time onward a warm friendship continued between Thoreau and Greeley, and many letters went to and fro, which reveal the able editor in the light of a modern Mæcenas to the author of the Musketaquid Georgics. No letters seem to have passed between them earlier than 1846; and in 1844-45 Thoreau must have known the "Tribune" editor best through his newspaper, and from the letters of Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and other common friends, who saw much of him then, admired and laughed at him, or did both by turns. Miss Fuller, who had gone to New York to write for the "Tribune," and to live in its Editor's family, wrote:-- "Mr. Greeley is a man of genuine excellence, honorable, benevolent, and of an uncorrupted disposition. He is sagacious, and, in his way, of even great abilities. In modes of life and manners, he is a man of the people,--and of the American people. With the exception of my own mother, I think him the most disinterestedly generous person I have ever known." There was a laughable side even to these fine traits, and there were eccentricities of dress and manner, which others saw more keenly than this generous woman. Ellery Channing,--whose eye no whimsical or beautiful object ever escaped,--in the letter of March, 1845, already cited, thus signaled to Thoreau the latest news of his friend:-- "Mumbo Jumbo is recovering from an attack of sore eyes, and will soon be out, in a pair of canvas trousers, scarlet jacket, and cocked hat. I understand he intends to demolish all the remaining species of Fetichism at a meal. I think it is probable it will vomit him." Thoreau wrote an essay on Carlyle in 1846, and in the summer of that year sent it to Mr. Greeley, with a request that he would find a place for it in some magazine. To this request, which Mr. Greeley himself had invited, no doubt, he thus replied:-- "_August 16, 1846._ "MY DEAR THOREAU,--Believe me when I say that I _mean_ to do the errand you have asked of me, and that soon. But I am not sanguine of success, and have hardly a hope that it will be immediate, if ever. I hardly know a work that would publish your article all at once, and 'to be continued' are words shunned like a pestilence. But I know you have written a good thing about Carlyle,--too solidly good, I fear, to be profitable to yourself, or attractive to publishers. Did'st thou ever, O my friend! ponder on the significance and cogency of the assurance, 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,' as applicable to literature,--applicable, indeed, to all things whatsoever? God grant us grace to endeavor to serve Him rather than Mammon,--that ought to suffice us. In my poor judgment, if anything is calculated to make a scoundrel of an honest man, writing to sell is that very particular thing. "Yours heartily, "HORACE GREELEY. "Remind Ralph Waldo Emerson and wife of my existence and grateful remembrance." On the 30th of September Mr. Greeley again wrote, saying,-- "I learned to-day, through Mr. Griswold, former editor of 'Graham's Magazine,' that your lecture is accepted, to appear in that magazine. Of course it is to be paid for at the usual rate, as I expressly so stated when I inclosed it to Graham. He has not written me a word on the subject, which induces me to think he may have written you.[10] Please write me if you would have me speak further on the subject. The pay, however, is sure, though the amount may not be large, and I think you may wait until the article appears, before making further stipulations on the subject." From the tenor of this I infer that Thoreau had written to say that he might wish to read his "Thomas Carlyle" as a lecture, and desired to stipulate for that before it was printed. He might be excused for some solicitude concerning payment, from his recent experience with the publishers of the "Boston Miscellany," which had printed, in 1843, his "Walk to Wachusett." At the very time when Thoreau, in New York, was making Greeley's acquaintance, Mr. Emerson, in Boston, was dunning the Miscellaneous publishers, and wrote to Thoreau (July 20, 1843):-- "When I called on ----, their partner, in their absence, informed me that they could not pay you, at present, any part of their debt on account of the Boston 'Miscellany.' After much talking all the promise he could offer was, 'that within a year it would probably be paid,'--a probability which certainly looks very slender. The very worst thing he said was the proposition that you should take your payment in the form of Boston Miscellanies! I shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals." But I cannot learn that anything came of it. Mr. Greeley, as we shall see, was a more successful collector. On the 26th of October, 1846, he continued the adventures of the wandering essay as follows:-- "MY FRIEND THOREAU,--I know you think it odd that you have not heard further, and, perhaps blame my negligence or engrossing cares, but, if so, without good reason. I have to-day received a letter from Griswold, in Philadelphia, who says: 'The article by Thoreau on Carlyle is in type, and will be paid for liberally.' 'Liberally' is quoted as an expression of Graham's. I know well the difference between a publisher's and an author's idea of what _is_ 'liberally'; but I give you the best I can get as the result of three letters to Philadelphia on this subject. "Success to you, my friend! Remind Mr. and Mrs. Emerson of my existence, and my lively remembrance of their various kindnesses. "Yours, very busy in our political contest, "HORACE GREELEY." It would seem that "Griswold" (who was Rufus W. Griswold, the biographer of Poe) and "Graham" (who was George R. Graham, the magazine publisher of Philadelphia), did not move so fast either in publication or in payment as they had led Mr. Greeley to expect; and also that Thoreau became impatient and wrote to his friend that he would withdraw the essay. Whereupon Mr. Greeley, under date of February 5, 1847, wrote thus:-- "MY DEAR THOREAU,--Although your letter only came to hand to-day, I attended to its subject yesterday, when I was in Philadelphia, on my way home from Washington. Your article is this moment in type, and will appear about the 20th inst., _as the leading article_ in 'Graham's Magazine' for next month. Now don't object to this, nor be unreasonably sensitive at the delay. It is immensely more important to you that the article should appear thus (that is, if you have any literary aspirations) than it is that you should make a few dollars by issuing it in some other way. As to lecturing, you have been at perfect liberty to deliver it as a lecture a hundred times, if you had chosen,--the more the better. It is really a good thing, and I will see that Graham pays you fairly for it. But its appearance there is worth far more to you than money. I know there has been too much delay, and have done my best to obviate it. But I could not. A magazine that pays, and which it is desirable to be known as a contributor to, is always crowded with articles, and has to postpone some for others of even less merit. I do this myself with good things that I am not required to pay for. "Thoreau, do not think hard of Graham. Do not try to stop the publication of your article. It is best as it is. But just sit down and write a like article about Emerson, which I will give you $25 for, if you cannot do better with it; then one about Hawthorne at your leisure, etc., etc. I will pay you the money for each of these articles on delivery, publish them when and how I please, leaving to you the copyright expressly. In a year or two, if you take care not to write faster than you think, you will have the material of a volume worth publishing,--and then we will see what can be done. There is a text somewhere in St. Paul--my Scriptural reading is getting rusty,--which says, 'Look not back to the things which are behind, but rather to those which are before,' etc. Commending this to your thoughtful appreciation, I am, yours, etc. "HORACE GREELEY." The Carlyle essay did appear in two numbers of "Graham's Magazine" (March and April, 1847), but alas, no payment came to hand. After waiting a year longer, Thoreau wrote to Greeley again (March 31, 1848), informing him of the delinquency of Griswold and Graham. At once, his friend replied (April 3), "It saddens and surprises me to know that your article was not paid for by Graham; and, since my honor is involved in the matter, I will see that you _are_ paid, and that at no distant day." Accordingly on the 17th of May, 1848, he writes again as follows:-- "DEAR FRIEND THOREAU,--I trust you have not thought me neglectful or dilatory with regard to your business. I have done my very best, throughout, and it is only to-day that I have been able to lay my hand on the money due you from Graham. I have been to see him in Philadelphia, but did not catch him in his business office; then I have been here to meet him, and been referred to his brother, etc. I finally found the two numbers of the work in which your article was published (not easy, I assure you, for he has them not, nor his brother, and I hunted them up, and bought one of them at a very out-of-the-way place), and with these I made out a regular bill for the contribution; drew a draft on G. R. Graham for the amount, gave it to his brother here for collection, and to-day received the money. Now you see how to get pay yourself, another time; I have pioneered the way, and you can follow it easily yourself. There has been no intentional injustice on Graham's part; but he is overwhelmed with business, has too many irons in the fire, and we did not go at him the right way. Had you drawn a draft on him, at first, and given it to the Concord Bank to send in for collection, you would have received your money long since. Enough of this. I have made Graham pay you $75, but I only send you $50, for, having got so much for Carlyle, I am ashamed to take your 'Maine Woods' for $25." This last allusion is to a new phase of the queer patronage which the good Mæcenas extended to our Concord poet. In his letter of March 31, 1848, Thoreau had offered Greeley, in compliance with his suggestion of the previous year, a paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which afterwards appeared in the "Union Magazine." On the 17th of April Greeley writes:-- "I inclose you $25 for your article on Maine Scenery, as promised. I know it is worth more, though I have not yet found time to read it; but I have tried once to sell it without success. It is rather long for my columns, and too fine for the million; but I consider it a cheap bargain, and shall print it myself, if I do not dispose of it to better advantage. You will not, of course, consider yourself under any sort of obligation to me, for my offer was in the way of business, and I have got more than the worth of my money." On the 17th of May he adds:-- "I have expectations of procuring it a place in a new magazine of high character that will pay. I don't expect to get as much for it as for Carlyle, but I hope to get $50. If you are satisfied to take the $25 for your 'Maine Woods,' say so, and I will send on the money; but I don't want to seem a Jew, buying your articles at half price to speculate upon. If you choose to let it go that way, it shall be so; but I would sooner do my best for you, and send you the money." On the 28th of October, 1848, he writes: "I break a silence of some duration to inform you that I hope on Monday to receive payment for your glorious account of 'Ktaadn and the Maine Woods,' which I bought of you at a Jew's bargain, and sold to the 'Union Magazine.' I am to get $75 for it, and, as I don't choose to _exploiter_ you at such a rate, I shall insist on inclosing you $25 more in this letter, which will still leave me $25 to pay various charges and labors I have incurred in selling your articles and getting paid for them,--the latter by far the more difficult portion of the business." In the letter of April 17, 1848, Mr. Greeley had further said:-- "If you will write me two or three articles in the course of the summer, I think I can dispose of them for your benefit. But write not more than half as long as your article just sent me, for that is too long for the magazines. If that were in two, it would be far more valuable. What about your book (the 'Week')? Is anything going on about it now? Why did not Emerson try it in England? I think the Howitts could get it favorably before the British public. If you can suggest any way wherein I can put it forward, do not hesitate, but command me." In the letter of May 17th, he reiterates the advice to be brief:-- "Thoreau, if you will only write one or two articles, when in the spirit, about half the length of this, I can sell it readily and advantageously. The length of your papers is the only impediment to their appreciation by the magazines. Give me one or two shorter, and I will try to coin them speedily." May 25th he returns to the charge, when sending the last twenty-five dollars for the "Maine Woods":-- "Write me something shorter when the spirit moves (never write a line otherwise, for the hack writer is a slavish beast, _I_ know), and I will sell it for you soon. I want one shorter article from your pen that will be quoted, as these long articles cannot be, and let the public know something of your way of thinking and seeing. It will do good. What do you think of following out your thought in an essay on 'The Literary Life?' You need not make a personal allusion, but I know you can write an article worth reading on that theme, when you are in the vein." After a six months' interval (November 19, 1848), Greeley resumes in a similar strain:-- "FRIEND THOREAU,--Yours of the 17th received. Say we are even on money counts, and let the matter drop. I have tried to serve you, and have been fully paid for my own disbursements and trouble in the premises. So we will move on. "I think you will do well to send me some passages from one or both of your new works to dispose of to the magazines. This will be the best kind of advertisement, whether for a publisher or for readers. You may write with an angel's pen, yet your writings have no mercantile money value till you are known and talked of as an author. Mr. Emerson would have been twice as much known and read, if he had written for the magazines a little, just to let common people know of his existence. I believe a chapter from one of your books printed in 'Graham,' or 'The Union,' will add many to the readers of the volume when issued. Here is the reason why British books sell so much better among us than American,--because they are thoroughly advertised through the British reviews, magazines, and journals which circulate or are copied among us. However, do as you please. If you choose to send me one of your manuscripts I will get it published, but I cannot promise you any considerable recompense; and, indeed, if Munroe will do it, that will be better. Your writings are in advance of the general mind here; Boston is nearer their standard. I never saw the verses you speak of. Won't you send them again? I have been buried up in politics for the last six weeks. Kind regards to Emerson. It is doubtful about my seeing you this season." Here the letters ceased for a time. "Munroe did it,"--that is, a Boston bookseller published Thoreau's "Week," which was favorably reviewed by George Ripley in the "Tribune," by Lowell in the "Massachusetts Quarterly," and by others elsewhere; but the book did not sell, and involved its author in debt for its printing. To meet this he took up surveying as a business, and after a time, when some payment must be made, he asked his friend Greeley for a loan. In the interval, Margaret Fuller had written from Europe those remarkable letters for the "Tribune," had married in Italy, sailed for home in 1850, and died on the shore of Fire Island, near New York, whither Thoreau went with her friends to learn her fate, and recover the loved remains. This was in July, 1850, and he no doubt saw Mr. Greeley there. A year and a half later, when he was seeking opportunities to lecture, he wrote to Mr. Greeley again, in February, 1852, offering himself to lecture in a course at New York, which the "Tribune" editor had some interest in. The reply was this:-- "NEW YORK, _February 24, 1852_. "MY FRIEND THOREAU,--Thank you for your remembrance, though the motto you suggest is impracticable. The People's Course is full for the season; and even if it were not, your name would probably not pass; because it is not merely necessary that each lecturer should continue _well_ the course, but that he shall be _known_ as the very man beforehand. Whatever draws less than fifteen hundred hearers damages the finances of the movement, so low is the admission, and so large the expense. But, Thoreau, you are a better speaker than many, but a far better writer still. Do you wish to swap any of your 'wood-notes wild' for dollars? If yea, and you will sell me some articles, shorter, if you please, than the former, I will try to coin them for you. Is it a bargain? Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." Thoreau responded at once with some manuscripts (March 5), and was thus addressed, March 18, by his friend:-- "I shall get you some money for the articles you sent me, though not immediately. As to your long account of a Canadian tour, I don't know. It looks unmanageable. Can't you cut it into three or four, and omit all that relates to time? The cities are described to death; but I know you are at home with Nature, and that _she_ rarely and slowly changes. Break this up, if you can, and I will try to have it swallowed and digested." A week later he sent a letter from the publisher, Sartain, accepting the articles for a low price,[11] and adds: "If you break up your 'Excursion to Canada' into three or four articles, I have no doubt I could get it published on similar terms." April 3, 1852, he returns to a former proposition, that Thoreau shall write about Emerson as he did six years before on Carlyle. "FRIEND THOREAU,--I wish you to write me an article on Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Works and Ways, extending to one hundred pages, or so, of letter sheet like this, to take the form of a review of his writings, but to give some idea of the Poet, the Genius, the Man,--with some idea of the New England scenery and home influence, which have combined to make him what he is. Let it be calm, searching, and impartial; nothing like adulation, but a just summing up of what he is and what he has done. I mean to get this into the 'Westminster Review,' but if not acceptable there, I will publish it elsewhere. I will pay you fifty dollars for the article when delivered; in advance, if you desire it. Say the word, and I will send the money at once. It is perfectly convenient to do so. Your 'Carlyle' article is my model, but you can give us Emerson better than you did Carlyle. I presume he would allow you to write extracts for this purpose from his lectures not yet published. I would delay the publication of the article to suit his publishing arrangements, should that be requested. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." To this request, as before, there came a prompt negative, although Thoreau was then sadly in need of money. Mr. Greeley wrote, April 20:-- "I am rather sorry you will not do the 'Works and Ways,' but glad that you are able to employ your time to better purpose. But your Quebec notes haven't reached me yet, and I fear the 'good time' is passing. They ought to have appeared in the June number of the monthlies, but now cannot before July. If you choose to send them to me all in a lump, I will try to get them printed in that way. I don't care about them if you choose to reserve, or to print them elsewhere; but I can better make a use for them at this season than at any other." They were sent, and offered to the "Whig Review," and to other magazines; but on the 25th of June, Mr. Greeley writes:-- "I have had only bad luck with your manuscript. Two magazines have refused it on the ground of its length, saying that articles 'To be continued' are always unpopular, however good. I will try again." It seems that the author had relied upon money from this source, and a week or two later he asks his friend to lend him the expected seventy-five dollars, offering security, with mercantile scrupulosity. Promptly came this answer:-- "NEW YORK, _July 8, 1852_. "DEAR THOREAU,--Yours received. I was absent yesterday. I _can_ lend you the seventy-five dollars, and am very glad to do it. Don't talk about security. I am sorry about your MSS., which I do not quite despair of using to your advantage. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." The "Yankee in Canada," as it is now called (the record of Thoreau's journey through French Canada in September, 1850, with Ellery Channing), was offered to "Putnam's Magazine" by Mr. Greeley, and begun there, but ill-luck attended it. Before it went the paper on "Cape Cod," which became the subject of controversy, first as to price, and then as to its tone towards the people of that region. This will explain the letters of Mr. Greeley that follow:-- "NEW YORK, _November 23, 1852_. "MY DEAR THOREAU,--I have made no bargain--none whatever--with Putnam concerning your MSS. I have indicated no price to them. I handed over the MS. because I wished it published, and presumed that was in accordance both with your interest and your wishes. And I now say to you, that if he will pay you three dollars per printed page, I think that will be very well. I have promised to write something for him myself, and shall be well satisfied with that price. Your 'Canada' is not so fresh and acceptable as if it had just been written on the strength of a last summer's trip, and I hope you will have it printed in 'Putnam's Monthly.' But I have said nothing to his folks as to price, and will not till I hear from you again. Very probably there was some misapprehension on the part of C. I presume the price now offered you is that paid to writers generally for the 'Monthly.' As to Sartain, I know his '(Union) Magazine' has broken down, but I guess he will pay you. I have seen but one of your articles printed by him, and I think the other may be reclaimed. Please address him at once." "NEW YORK, _January 2, 1853_. "FRIEND THOREAU,--I have yours of the 29th, and credit you $20. Pay me when and in such sums as may be convenient. I am sorry you and C. cannot agree so as to have your whole MS. printed. It will be worth nothing elsewhere after having partly appeared in Putnam's. I think it is a mistake to conceal the authorship of the several articles, making them all (so to speak) _editorial_; but _if_ that is done, don't you see that the elimination of very flagrant heresies (like your defiant Pantheism) becomes a necessity? If you had withdrawn your MSS., on account of the abominable misprints in the first number, your ground would have been far more tenable. "However, do what you will. Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." Thoreau did what he would, of course, and the article in Putnam came to an abrupt end. The loan made in July, 1852, was paid with interest on the 9th of March, 1853, as the following note shows:-- "NEW YORK, _March 16, 1853_. "DEAR SIR,--I have yours of the 9th, inclosing Putnam's check for $59, making $79 in all you have paid me. I am paid in full, and this letter is your receipt in full. I don't want any pay for my 'services,' whatever they may have been. Consider me your friend who _wished_ to serve you, however unsuccessfully. Don't break with C. or Putnam." A year later, Thoreau renewed his subscription to the "Weekly Tribune," but the letter miscarried. In due time came this reply to a third letter:-- "_March 6, 1854._ "DEAR SIR,--I presume your first letter containing the $2 was robbed by our general mail robber of New Haven, who has just been sent to the State's Prison. Your second letter has probably failed to receive attention owing to a press of business. But I will make all right. You ought to have the Semi-weekly, and I shall order it sent to you one year on trial; if you choose to write me a letter or so some time, very well; if not, we will be even without that. "Thoreau, I want you to do something on _my_ urgency. I want you to collect and arrange your 'Miscellanies' and send them to me. Put in 'Ktaadn,' 'Carlyle,' 'A Winter Walk,' 'Canada,' etc., and I will try to find a publisher who will bring them out at his own risk, and (I hope) to your ultimate profit. If you have anything new to put with them, very well; but let me have about a 12mo volume whenever you can get it ready, and see if there is not something to your credit in the bank of Fortune. Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." In reply, Thoreau notified his friend of the early publication of "Walden," and was thus met:-- "_March 23, 1854._ "DEAR THOREAU,--I am glad your 'Walden' is coming out. _I_ shall announce it at once, whether Ticknor does or not. I am in no hurry now about your 'Miscellanies;' take your time, select your title, and prepare your articles deliberately and finally. Then, if Ticknor will give you something worth having, let him have this too; if proffering it to him is to glut your market, let it come to me. But take your time. I was only thinking you were merely waiting when you might be doing something. I referred (without naming you) to your 'Walden' experience in my lecture on 'Self-Culture,' with which I have had ever so many audiences. This episode excited much interest, and I have been repeatedly asked who it is that I refer to. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY. "P. S.--You must know Miss Elizabeth Hoar, whereas I hardly do. Now, I have offered to edit Margaret's works, and I want of Elizabeth a letter or memorandum of personal recollections of Margaret and her ideas. Can't you ask her to write it for me? "H. G." To the request of this postscript Thoreau attended at once, but the "Miscellanies" dwelt not in his mind, it would seem. He had now become deeply concerned about slavery, was also pursuing his studies concerning the Indians, and had little time for the collection of his published papers. A short note of April 2, 1854, closes this part of the Greeley correspondence, thus:-- "DEAR THOREAU,--Thank you for your kindness in the matter of Margaret. Pray take no further trouble; but if anything should come in your way, calculated to help me, do not forget. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." In August, 1855, Mr. Greeley wrote to suggest that copies of "Walden" should be sent to the "Westminster Review," to "The Reasoner," 147 Fleet Street, London, to Gerald Massey, office of the "News," Edinburgh, and to "---- Wills, Esq., Dickens's Household Words," adding:-- "There is a small class in England who ought to know what you have written, and I feel sure your publishers would not throw away copies sent to these periodicals; especially if your 'Week on the Concord and Merrimac' could accompany them. Chapman, editor of the 'Westminster,' expressed surprise that your book had not been sent him, and I could find very few who had read or seen it. If a new edition should be called for, try to have it better known in Europe, but have a few copies sent to those worthy of it, at all events." In March, 1856, Mr. Greeley opened a new correspondence with Thoreau, asking him to become the tutor of his children, and to live with him, or near him, at Chappaqua. The proposition was made in the most generous manner, and was for a time considered by Thoreau, who felt a sense of obligation as well as a sincere friendship towards the man who had believed in him and served him so seasonably in the years of his obscurity. But it resulted in nothing further than a brief visit to Mr. Greeley in the following autumn, during which, as Thoreau used to say, Mr. Alcott and Mr. Greeley went to the opera together. CHAPTER X. IN WOOD AND FIELD. Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. "He was a good swimmer," says Emerson, "a good runner, skater, boatman, and would outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all." In his last illness says Channing,-- "His habit of engrossing his thoughts in a journal, which had lasted for a quarter of a century,--his out-door life, of which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his living ceased,--this now became so incontrovertibly a thing of the past that he said once, standing at the window, 'I cannot see on the outside at all. We thought ourselves great philosophers in those wet days when we used to go out and sit down by the wall-sides.' This was absolutely all he was ever heard to say of that outward world during his illness, neither could a stranger in the least infer that he had ever a friend in field or wood." This out-door life began as early as he could recollect, and his special attraction to rivers, woods, and lakes was a thing of his boyhood. He had begun to collect Indian relics before leaving college, and was a diligent student of natural history there. Whether he was naturally an observer or not (which has been denied in a kind of malicious paradox), let his life-work attest. Early in 1847 he made some collections of fishes, turtles, etc., in Concord for Agassiz, then newly arrived in America, and I have (in a letter of May 3, 1847) this account of their reception:-- "I carried them immediately to Mr. Agassiz, who was highly delighted with them. Some of the species he had seen before, but never in so fresh condition. Others, as the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and the little turtle he knew only from the books. I am sure you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble, if you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he surveyed each fin and scale. He said the small mud-turtle was really a very rare species, quite distinct from the snapping-turtle. The breams and pout seemed to please the Professor very much. He would gladly come up to Concord to make a spearing excursion, as you suggested, but is drawn off by numerous and pressing engagements." On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:-- "Mr. Agassiz was very much surprised and pleased at the extent of the collections you sent during his absence; the little fox he has established in comfortable quarters in his backyard, where he is doing well. Among the fishes you sent there is one, probably two, new species." June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered, much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to cultivate Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction. The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there, so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot, engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain had been explored in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods, and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with felicity. "In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang, Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang; He trod the unplanted forest-floor, whereon The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone; Where feeds the moose and walks the surly bear, And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads, And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers. He heard, when in the grove, at intervals With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,-- One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, Declares the close of its green century. * * * * * Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed, He roamed, content alike with man and beast, Where darkness found him he lay glad at night; There the red morning touched him with its light. Three moons his great heart him a hermit made, So long he roved at will the boundless shade." Thus much is a picture of the Maine forests, and may have been suggested in part by the woodland life of Dr. Jackson there while surveying the State. But what follows is the brave proclamation of the poet, for himself and his heroes, among whom Thoreau and John Brown must be counted, since it declares their creed and practice,--while in the last couplet the whole inner doctrine of Transcendentalism is set forth:-- "The timid it concerns to ask their way, And fear what foes in caves and swamps can stray, To make no step until the event is known, And ills to come as evils past bemoan. Not so the wise: no timid watch he keeps To spy what danger on his pathway creeps; Go where he will the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome; Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, By God's own light illumined and foreshowed." Thoreau may have heard these verses read by their author in his study, before he set forth on his first journey to Maine in 1838; they were first published in the "Dial" in October, 1840, but are omitted, for some reason, in a partial edition of Emerson's Poems (in 1876). He never complied with this description so far as to spend three months in the Maine woods, even in the three campaigns which he made there (in 1846, in 1853, and in 1857), for in none of these did he occupy three weeks, and in all but little more than a month. His account of them, as now published, makes a volume by itself, which his friend Channing edited two years after Thoreau's death, and which contains the fullest record of his studies of the American Indian. It was his purpose to develop these studies into a book concerning the Indian, and for this purpose he made endless readings in the Jesuit Fathers, in books of travel, and in all the available literature of the subject. But the papers he had thus collected were not left in such form that they could be published; and so much of his untiring diligence seems now lost, almost thrown away. Doubtless his friends and editors, upon call, will one day print detached portions of these studies, from entries in his journals, and from his commonplace books. In his explorations of Concord and its vicinity, as well as in those longer foot-journeys which he took among the mountains and along the sea-shore of New England, from 1838 to 1860, Thoreau's habits were those of an experienced hunter, though he seldom used a gun in his years of manhood. Upon this point he says in "Walden":-- "Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless than even those of the savage. Perhaps I have owed to fishing and hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which, otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets, even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.... I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. I have long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I am now inclined to think there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.... We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected." Emerson mentions that Thoreau preferred his spy-glass to his gun to bring the bird nearer to his eye, and says also of his patience in out-door observation:-- "He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits,--nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him." And I have thought that Emerson had Thoreau in mind when he described his "Forester":-- "He took the color of his vest From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast; For as the wood-kinds lurk and hide, So walks the woodman unespied." The same friend said of him:-- "It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants;[12] in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, 'that either he had told the bees things, or the bees had told him.' Snakes coiled round his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in the mild form of botany and ichthyology. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses; he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. Every fact lay in order and glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole." It was this poetic and coördinating vision of the natural world which distinguished Thoreau from the swarm of naturalists, and raised him to the rank of a philosopher even in his tedious daily observations. Channing, no less than Emerson, has observed and noted this trait, giving to his friend the exact title of "poet-naturalist," and also, in his poem, "The Wanderer," bestowing on him the queer name of _Idolon_, which he thus explains:-- "So strangely was the general current mixed With his vexed native blood in its crank wit, That as a mirror shone the common world To this observing youth,--whom noting, thence I called _Idolon_,--ever firm to mark Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole." In an earlier poem Channing had called him "Rudolpho," and had thus portrayed his daily and nightly habits of observation:-- "I see Rudolpho cross our honest fields Collapsed with thought, and as the Stagyrite At intellectual problems, mastering Day after day part of the world's concern. Nor welcome dawns nor shrinking nights him menace, Still adding to his list beetle and bee,-- Of what the vireo builds a pensile nest, And why the peetweet drops her giant egg In wheezing meadows, odorous with sweet brake. Who wonders that the flesh declines to grow Along his sallow pits? or that his life, To social pleasure careless, pines away In dry seclusion and unfruitful shade? I must admire thy brave apprenticeship To those dry forages, although the worldling Laugh in his sleeve at thy compelled devotion. So shalt thou learn, Rudolpho, as thou walk'st, More from the winding lanes where Nature leaves Her unaspiring creatures, and surpass In some fine saunter her acclivity." The hint here given that Thoreau injured his once robust health by his habits of out-door study and the hardships he imposed on himself, had too much truth in it. Growing up with great strength of body and limb, and having cultivated his physical advantages by a temperate youth much exercised with manual labor, in which he took pleasure, Thoreau could not learn the lesson of moderation in those pursuits to which his nature inclined. He exposed himself in his journeys and night encampments to cold and hunger, and changes of weather, which the strongest cannot brave with impunity. Mr. Edward Hoar, who traveled with him in the Maine woods in 1857,--a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an Indian, among the head-waters of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John's rivers,--and who in 1858 visited the White Mountains with him, remembers, with a shiver to this day, the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mount Washington, with insufficient blankets,--Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons. It was after such an experience as this on Monadnoc, whither Thoreau and Channing went to camp out for a week in August, 1860, that the latter wrote:-- "With the night, Reserved companion, cool and sparsely clad, Dream, till the threefold hour with lowly voice Steals whispering in thy frame, 'Rise, valiant youth! The dawn draws on apace, envious of thee, And polar in his gait; advance thy limbs, Nor strive to heat the stones.'" Thoreau had much scorn for weakness like this, and said of his comrade, "I fear that he did not improve all the night as he might have done, to sleep." This was his last excursion, and he died within less than two years afterward. The account of it which Channing has given may therefore be read with interest:-- "He ascended such hills as Monadnoc by his own path; would lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point he proposed to visit below,--perhaps forty miles away on the landscape, and set off bravely to make the 'shortcut.' The lowland people wondered to see him scaling the heights as if he had lost his way, or at his jumping over their cow-yard fences,--asking if he had fallen from the clouds. In a walk like this he always carried his umbrella; and on this Monadnoc trip, when about a mile from the station (in Troy, N. H.), a torrent of rain came down; without the umbrella his books, blankets, maps, and provisions would all have been spoiled, or the morning lost by delay. On the mountain there being a thick soaking fog, the first object was to camp and make tea.[13] He spent five nights in camp, having built another hut, to get varied views. Flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks were carefully examined, all parts of the mountain were visited, and as accurate a map as could be made by pocket compass was carefully sketched and drawn out, in the five days spent there,--with notes of the striking aerial phenomena, incidents of travel and natural history. The fatigue, the blazing sun, the face getting broiled, the pint-cup never scoured, shaving unutterable, your stockings dreary, having taken to peat,--not all the books in the world, as Sancho says, could contain the adventures of a week in camping. The wild, free life, the open air, the new and strange sounds by night and day, the odd and bewildering rocks, amid which a person can be lost within a rod of camp; the strange cries of visitors to the summit; the great valley over to Wachusett, with its thunder-storms and battles in the cloud; the farmers' backyards in Jaffrey, where the family cotton can be seen bleaching on the grass, but no trace of the pigmy family; the dry, soft air all night, the lack of dew in the morning; the want of water,--a pint being a good deal,--these, and similar things make up some part of such an excursion." These excursions were common with Thoreau, but less so with Channing, who therefore, notes down many things that his friend would not think worth recording, except as a part of that calendar of Nature which he set himself to keep, and of which his journals, for more than twenty years, are the record. From these he made up his printed volumes, and there may be read the details that he registered. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, and every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest. Much of this is the dryest detail, but everywhere you come upon strokes of beauty, in a single word-picture, or in a page of idyllic description, like this of the Concord heifer, which might be a poem of Theocritus, or one of the lost bucolics of Moschus:-- "One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by degrees approach, as if to take some morsel from our hands, while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by degrees drew near with her fair limbs progressive, making pretense of browsing; nearer and nearer till there was wafted to us the bovine fragrance,--cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be,--and then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest recognition within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for his herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured as a hind; her hide was mingled white and fawn color; on her muzzle's tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy; and on her side turned toward me the map of Asia plain to see. Farewell, dear heifer! though thou forgettest me, my prayer to heaven shall be that thou may'st not forget thyself. "I saw her name was Sumach. And by the kindred spots I knew her mother, more sedate and matronly, with full-grown bag, and on her sides was Asia, great and small, the plains of Tartary, even to the pole, while on her daughter's was Asia Minor. She was not disposed to wanton with the herdsman. As I walked the heifer followed me, and took an apple from my hand, and seemed to care more for the hand than the apple. So innocent a face I have rarely seen on any creature, and I have looked in the face of many heifers; and as she took the apple from my hand, I caught the apple of her eye. There was no sinister expression. She smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom. For horns, though she had them, they were so well disposed in the right place, but neither up nor down, that I do not now remember she had any." Or take this apostrophe to the "Queen of Night, the Huntress Diana," which is not a translation from some Greek worshipper, but the sincere ascription of a New England hunter of the noblest deer:-- "My dear, my dewy sister, let thy rain descend on me! I not only love thee, but I love the best of thee,--that is to love thee rarely. I do not love thee every day--commonly I love those who are less than thee; I love thee only on great days. Thy dewy words feed me like the manna of the morning. I am as much thy sister as thy brother; thou art as much my brother as my sister. It is a portion of thee and a portion of me which are of kin. O my sister! O Diana! thy tracks are on the eastern hill; thou newly didst pass that way. I, the hunter, saw them in the morning dew. My eyes are the hounds that pursued thee. I hear thee; thou canst speak, I cannot; I fear and forget to answer; I am occupied with hearing. I awoke and thought of thee; thou wast present to my mind. How camest thou there? Was I not present to thee, likewise?" In such a lofty mystical strain did this Concord Endymion declare his passion for Nature, in whose green lap he slumbers now on the hill-side which the goddess nightly revisits. "O sister of the sun, draw near, With softly-moving step and slow, For dreaming not of earthly woe Thou seest Endymion sleeping here!" CHAPTER XI. PERSONAL TRAITS AND SOCIAL LIFE. The face of Thoreau, once seen, could not easily be forgotten, so strong was the mark that genius had set upon it. The portrait of him, which has been commonly engraved, though it bore some resemblance at the time it was taken (by S. W. Rowse, in 1854), was never a very exact likeness. A few years later he began to wear his beard long, and this fine silken muffler for his delicate throat and lungs, was also an ornament to his grave and thoughtful face, concealing its weakest feature, a receding chin. The head engraved for this volume is from a photograph taken, in 1861, at New Bedford, and shows him as he was in his last years. His personal traits were not startling and commanding like those of Webster, who drew the eyes of all men wherever he appeared, but they were peculiar, and dwelt long in the memory. His features were prominent, his eyes large, round, and deep-set, under bold brows, and full of fearless meditation; the color varying from blue to gray, as if with the moods of his mind. A youth who saw him for the first time, said with a start, "How deep and clear is the mark that _thought_ sets upon a man's face!" And, indeed, no man could fail to recognize in him that rare intangible essence we call _thought_; his slight figure was active with it, while in his face it became contemplative, as if, like his own peasant, he were "meditating some vast and sunny problem." Channing says of his appearance:-- "In height he was about the average; in his build spare, with limbs that were rather longer than usual, or of which he made a longer use. His features were marked; the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen,--blue in certain lights and in others gray; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste; the clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking he made a short cut, if he could, and when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side, seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. The intensity of his mind, like Dante's, conveyed the breathing of aloofness,--his eyes bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands perhaps clasped behind him, or held closely at his side,--the fingers made into a fist." It is not possible to describe him more exactly. In December, 1854, Thoreau went to lecture at Nantucket, and on his way spent a day or two with one of his correspondents, Daniel Ricketson of New Bedford,--reaching his house on Christmas day. His host, who then saw him for the first time, thus recorded his impressions:-- "I had expected him at noon, but as he did not arrive, I had given him up for the day. In the latter part of the afternoon, I was clearing off the snow, which had fallen during the day, from my front steps, when, looking up, I saw a man walking up the carriage-road, bearing a portmanteau in one hand and an umbrella in the other. He was dressed in a long overcoat of dark color, and wore a dark soft hat. I had no suspicion it was Thoreau, and rather supposed it was a pedler of small wares." This was a common mistake to make about Thoreau. When he ran the gauntlet of the Cape Cod villages,--"feeling as strange," he says, "as if he were in a town in China,"--one of the old fishermen could not believe that he had not something to sell, as Bronson Alcott had when he perambulated Eastern Virginia and North Carolina in 1819-22, peddling silks and jewelry. Being assured that Thoreau was not peddling spectacles or books, the fisherman said at last: "Well, it makes no odds what it is you carry, so long as you carry Truth along with you." "As Thoreau came near me," continues Mr. Ricketson, "he stopped and said, 'You do not know me.' It flashed at once on my mind that the person before me was my correspondent, whom in my imagination I had figured as stout and robust, instead of the small and rather inferior-looking man before me. I concealed my disappointment, and at once replied, 'I presume this is Mr. Thoreau.' Taking his portmanteau, I conducted him to his room, already awaiting him. My disappointment at his personal appearance passed off on hearing his conversation at the table and during the evening; and rarely through the years of my acquaintance with him did his presence conflict with his noble powers of mind, his rich conversation, and broad erudition. His face was afterwards greatly improved in manly expression by the growth of his beard, which he wore in full during the later years of his life; but when I first saw him he had just been sitting for the crayon portrait of 1854, which represents him without the beard. The 'ambrotype' of him, which is engraved for your volume, was taken for me by Dunshee, at New Bedford, August 21, 1861, on his last visit to me at Brooklawn. His health was then failing,--he had a racking cough,--but his face, except a shade of sadness in the eyes, did not show it. Of this portrait, Miss Sophia Thoreau, to whom I sent it soon after her brother's death, wrote me, May 26, 1862: 'I cannot tell you how agreeably surprised I was, on opening the little box, to find my own lost brother again. I could not restrain my tears. The picture is invaluable to us. I discover a slight shade about the eyes, expressive of weariness; but a stranger might not observe it. I am very glad to possess a picture of so late a date. The crayon, drawn eight years ago next summer, we considered good; it betrays the poet. Mr. Channing, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Alcott, and many other friends who have looked at the ambrotype, express much satisfaction.'" Of Thoreau's appearance then (at the age of thirty-seven), Mr. Ricketson goes on to say:-- "The most expressive feature of his face was his eye, blue in color, and full of the greatest humanity and intelligence. His head was of medium size, the same as that of Emerson, and he wore a number seven hat. His arms were rather long, his legs short, and his hands and feet rather large. His sloping shoulders were a mark of observation. But when in usual health he was strong and vigorous, a remarkable pedestrian, tiring out nearly all his companions in his prolonged tramps through woods and marshes, when in pursuit of some rare plant. In Thoreau, as in Dr. Kane, Lord Nelson, and other heroic men, it was the spirit more than the temple in which it dwelt, that made the man." A strange mistake has prevailed as to the supposed churlishness and cynical severity of Thoreau, which Mr. Alcott, in one of his octogenarian sonnets, has corrected, and which all who knew the man would protest against. Of his domestic character Mr. Ricketson writes:-- "Some have accused him of being an imitator of Emerson, others as unsocial, impracticable, and ascetic. Now, he was none of these. A more original man never lived, nor one more thoroughly a personification of civility. Having been an occasional guest at his house, I can assert that no man could hold a finer relationship with his family than he." Channing says the same thing more quaintly:-- "In his own home he was one of those characters who may be called household treasures; always on the spot with skillful eye and hand, to raise the best melons, plant the orchard with the choicest trees, and act as extempore mechanic; fond of the pets,--his sister's flowers or sacred tabby--kittens being his favorites,--he would play with them by the half hour." He was sometimes given to music and song, and now and then, in moments of great hilarity, would dance gayly,--as he did once at Brooklawn, in the presence of his host, Mr. Ricketson, and Mr. Alcott, who was also visiting there. On the same occasion he sung his unique song of "Tom Bowline," which none who heard would ever forget, and finished the evening with his dance. Hearing Mr. Ricketson speak of this dance, Miss Thoreau said:-- "I have so often witnessed the like, that I can easily imagine how it was; and I remember that Henry gave me some account of it. I recollect he said he did not scruple to tread on Mr. Alcott's toes." Mr. Ricketson's own account is this:-- "One afternoon, when my wife was playing an air upon the piano,--'Highland Laddie,' perhaps,--Thoreau became very hilarious, sang 'Tom Bowline,' and finally entered upon an improvised dance. Not being able to stand what appeared to me at the time the somewhat ludicrous appearance of our Walden hermit, I retreated to my 'shanty,' a short distance from my house; while my older and more humor-loving friend Alcott remained and saw it through, much to his amusement. It left a pleasant memory, which I recorded in some humble lines that afterwards appeared in my 'Autumn Sheaf.'" After Thoreau's return home from this visit, his New Bedford friend seems to have sent him a copy of the words and music of "Tom Bowline," which was duly acknowledged and handed over to the musical people of Concord for them to play and sing. It is a fine old pathetic sailor-song of Dibdin's, which pleased Thoreau (whose imagination delighted in the sea), and perhaps reminded him of his brother John. As Thoreau sang it, the verses ran thus:-- "Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowline, The darling of our crew; No more he'll hear the tempest howling, For death has broached him to. His form was of the manliest beauty; His heart was kind and soft; Faithful, below, he did his duty, But now he's gone aloft. "Tom never from his word departed, His virtues were so rare; His friends were many and true-hearted, His Poll was kind and fair. And then he'd sing so blithe and jolly; Ah, many's the time and oft! But mirth is changed to melancholy, For Tom is gone aloft. "Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather When He who all commands Shall give, to call life's crew together, The word to pipe all hands. Thus death, who kings and tars dispatches, In vain Tom's life has doffed; For though his body's under hatches, His soul is gone aloft!" Another of his songs was Moore's "Canadian Boat Song," with its chorus,-- "Row brothers, row." Mrs. W. H. Forbes, who knew him in her childhood, from the age of six to that of fifteen more particularly, and who first remembers him in his hut at Walden, writes me:-- "The time when Mr. Thoreau was our more intimate playfellow must have been in the years from 1850 to 1855. He used to come in, at dusk, as my brother and I sat on the rug before the dining-room fire, and, taking the great green rocking-chair, he would tell us stories. Those I remember were his own adventures, as a child. He began with telling us of the different houses he had lived in, and what he could remember about each. The house where he was born was on the Virginia road, near the old Bedford road. The only thing he remembered about that house was that from its windows he saw a flock of geese walking along in a row on the other side of the road; but to show what a long memory he had, when he told his mother of this, she said the only time he could have seen that sight was, when he was about eight months old, for they left that house then. Soon after, he lived in the old house on the Lexington road, nearly opposite Mr. Emerson's. There he was tossed by a cow as he played near the door, in his red flannel dress,--and so on, with a story for every house. He used to delight us with the adventures of a brood of fall chickens, which slept at night in a tall old fashioned fig-drum in the kitchen, and as their bed was not changed when they grew larger, they packed themselves every night each in its own place, and grew up, not shapely, but shaped to each other and the drum, like figs! "Sometimes he would play juggler tricks for us, and swallow his knife and produce it again from our ears or noses. We usually ran to bring some apples for him as soon as he came in, and often he would cut one in halves in fine points that scarcely showed on close examination, and then the joke was to ask Father to break it for us and see it fall to pieces in his hands. But perhaps the evenings most charming were those when he brought some ears of pop-corn in his pocket and headed an expedition to the garret to hunt out the old brass warming-pan; in which he would put the corn, and hold it out and shake it over the fire till it was heated through, and at last, as we listened, the rattling changed to popping. When this became very brisk, he would hold the pan over the rug and lift the lid, and a beautiful fountain of the white corn flew all over us. It required both strength and patience to hold out the heavy warming-pan at arm's length so long, and no one else ever gave us that pleasure. "I remember his singing 'Tom Bowline' to us, and also playing on his flute, but that was earlier. In the summer he used to make willow whistles, and trumpets out of the stems of squash leaves, and onion leaves. When he found fine berries during his walks, he always remembered us, and came to arrange a huckleberrying for us. He took charge of the 'hay rigging' with the load of children, who sat on the floor which was spread with hay, covered with a buffalo-robe; he sat on a board placed across the front and drove, and led the frolic with his jokes and laughter as we jolted along, while the elders of the family accompanied us in a 'carryall.' Either he had great tact and skill in managing us and keeping our spirits and play within bounds, or else he became a child in sympathy with us, for I do not remember a check or reproof from him, no matter how noisy we were. He always was most kind to me and made it his especial care to establish me in the 'thickest places,' as we used to call them. Those sunny afternoons are bright memories, and the lamb-kill flowers and sweet 'everlasting,' always recall them and his kind care. Once in awhile he took us on the river in his boat, a rare pleasure then; and I remember one brilliant autumn afternoon, when he took us to gather the wild grapes overhanging the river, and we brought home a load of crimson and golden boughs as well. He never took us to walk with him, but sometimes joined us for a little way, if he met us in the woods on Sunday afternoons. He made those few steps memorable by showing us many wonders in so short a space: perhaps the only chincapin oak in Concord, so hidden that no one but himself could have discovered it--or some remarkable bird, or nest, or flower. He took great interest in my garden of wild flowers, and used to bring me seeds, or roots, of rare plants. In his last illness it did not occur to us that he would care to see us, but his sister told my mother that he watched us from the window as we passed, and said: 'Why don't they come to see me? I love them as if they were my own.' After that we went often, and he always made us so welcome that we liked to go. I remember our last meetings with as much pleasure as the old play-days." Although so great a traveler in a small circle--being every day a-field when not too ill,--he was also a great stay-at-home. He never crossed the ocean, nor saw Niagara or the Mississippi until the year before his death. He lived within twenty miles of Boston, but seldom went there, except to pass through it on his way to the Maine woods, to Cape Cod, to the house of his friend, Marston Watson at Plymouth, or to Daniel Ricketson's at New Bedford. To the latter he wrote in February, 1855:-- "I did not go to Boston, for, with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors (George Minott), an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home." What took him from home in the winter season was generally some engagement to lecture, of which he had many after his Walden life became a little known abroad. From the year 1847 Thoreau may be said to have fairly entered on his career as author and lecturer; having taken all the needful degrees and endured most of the mortifications necessary for the public profession of authorship. Up to that time he had supported himself, except while in college, chiefly by the labor of his hands; after 1847, though still devoted to manual labor occasionally, he yet worked chiefly with his head as thinker, observer, surveyor, magazine contributor, and lecturer. His friends were the first promoters of his lectures, and among his correspondence are some letters from Hawthorne, inviting him to the Salem Lyceum. The first of these letters is dated, Salem, October 21, 1848, and runs thus:-- "MY DEAR SIR,--The managers of the Salem Lyceum, sometime ago, voted that you should be requested to deliver a lecture before that Institution during the approaching season. I know not whether Mr. Chever, the late corresponding secretary, communicated the vote to you; at all events, no answer has been received, and as Mr. Chever's successor in office, I am requested to repeat the invitation. Permit me to add my own earnest wishes that you will accept it; and also, laying aside my official dignity, to express my wife's desire and my own that you will be our guest, if you do come. In case of your compliance, the Managers desire to know at what time it will best suit you to deliver the lecture. "Very truly yours, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE, "_Cor. Sec'y, Salem Lyceum_. "P.S. I live at No. 14 Mall Street, where I shall be very happy to see you. The stated fee for lectures is $20." A month later, Hawthorne, who had received an affirmative answer from Thoreau, wrote to him from Boston (November 20, 1848), as follows:-- "MY DEAR THOREAU,--I did not sooner write you, because there were preëngagements for the two or three first lectures, so that I could not arrange matters to have you come during the present month. But, as it happens, the expected lectures have failed us, and we now depend on you to come the very next Wednesday. I shall announce you in the paper of to-morrow, so you _must_ come. I regret that I could not give you longer notice. We shall expect you on Wednesday at No. 14 Mall Street. "Yours truly, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE. "If it be utterly impossible for you to come, pray write me a line so that I may get it Wednesday evening. But by all means come. "This secretaryship is an intolerable bore. I have traveled thirty miles, this wet day, on no other business." Apparently another lecture was wanted by the Salem people the same winter, for on the 19th of February, 1849, when the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac" was in press, Hawthorne wrote again, thus:-- "The managers request that you will lecture before the Salem Lyceum on Wednesday evening _after_ next, that is to say, on the 28th inst. May we depend on you? Please to answer immediately, if convenient. Mr. Alcott delighted my wife and me, the other evening, by announcing that you had a book in press. I rejoice at it, and nothing doubt of such success as will be worth having. Should your manuscripts all be in the printer's hands, I suppose you can reclaim one of them for a single evening's use, to be returned the next morning,--or perhaps that Indian lecture, which you mentioned to me, is in a state of forwardness. Either that, or a continuation of the Walden experiment (or indeed, anything else), will be acceptable. We shall expect you at 14 Mall Street. "Very truly yours, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE." These letters were written just before Hawthorne was turned out of his office in the Salem custom-house, and while his own literary success was still in abeyance,--the "Scarlet Letter" not being published till a year later. They show the friendly terms on which Hawthorne stood with the Concord Transcendentalists, after leaving that town in 1846. He returned to it in 1852, when he bought Mr. Alcott's estate, then called "Hillside," which he afterward christened "Wayside," and by this name it is still known. Mr. Alcott bought this place in 1845, and from then till 1848, when he left it to reside in Boston, he expended, as Hawthorne said, "a good deal of taste and some money in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems, and branches, and trees, on a system of his own." In this work he was aided by Thoreau, who was then in the habit of performing much manual labor. In 1847 he joined Mr. Alcott in the task of cutting trees for Mr. Emerson's summer-house, which the three friends were to build in the garden. Mr. Emerson, however, went with them to the woods but one day, when finding his strength and skill unequal to that of his companions, he withdrew, and left the work to them. Mr. Alcott relates that Thoreau was not only a master workman with the axe, but also had such strength of arm, that when a tree they were felling lodged in some unlucky position, he rushed at it, and by main strength carried out the trunk until it fell where he wanted it. It was one of the serious doctrines of the Transcendentalists that each person should perform his quota of hand-work, and accordingly Alcott, Channing, Hawthorne, and the rest, took their turn at wood-chopping, hay-making, plowing, tree-pruning, grafting, etc. Even Emerson trimmed his own orchard, and sometimes lent a hand in hoeing corn and raking hay. To Thoreau such tasks were easy, and, unlike some amateur farmers, he was quite willing to be seen at his work, whatever it might be (except the pencil-making, in which there were certain secrets), and by choice he wore plain working clothes, and generally old ones. The fashion of his garments gave him no concern, and was often old, or even grotesque. At one time he had a fancy for corduroy, such as Irish laborers then wore, but which occasionally appeared in the wardrobe of a gentleman. As he climbed trees, waded swamps, and was out in all weathers during his daily excursions, he naturally dressed himself for what he had to do. As may be inferred from his correspondence with Horace Greeley, Thoreau's whole income from authorship during the twenty years that he practiced that profession, cannot have exceeded a few hundred dollars yearly,--not half enough in most years to supply even his few wants. He would never be indebted to any person pecuniarily, and therefore he found out other ways of earning his subsistence and paying his obligations,--gardening, fence-building, white-washing, pencil-making, land-surveying, etc.,--for he had great mechanical skill, and a patient, conscientious industry in whatever he undertook. When his father, who had been long living in other men's houses, undertook, at last, to build one of his own, Henry worked upon it, and performed no small part of the manual labor. He had no false pride in such matters,--was, indeed, rather proud of his workmanship, and averse to the gentility even of his industrious village. During his first residence at Mr. Emerson's in 1841-43, Thoreau managed the garden and did other hand-work for his friend; and when Mr. Emerson went to England in 1847, he returned to the house (soon after leaving his Walden hut), and took charge of his friend's household affairs in his absence. In a letter to his sister Sophia (October 24, 1847), Thoreau says:-- "... I went to Boston the 5th of this month to see Mr. Emerson off to Europe. He sailed in the 'Washington Irving' packet ship, the same in which Mr. Hedge went before him. Up to this trip, the first mate aboard this ship was, as I hear, one Stephens, a Concord boy, son of Stephens, the carpenter, who used to live above Mr. Dennis. Mr. Emerson's state-room was like a carpeted dark closet, about six feet square, with a large keyhole for a window (the window was about as big as a saucer, and the glass two inches thick), not to mention another skylight overhead in the deck, of the size of an oblong doughnut, and about as opaque. Of course, it would be in vain to look up, if any contemplative promenader put his foot upon it. Such will be his lodgings for two or three weeks; and instead of a walk in Walden woods, he will take a promenade on deck, where the few trees, you know, are stripped of their bark." There is a poem of Thoreau's, of uncertain date, called "The Departure," which, as I suppose, expresses his emotions at leaving finally, in 1848, the friendly house of Emerson, where he had dwelt so long, upon terms of such ideal intimacy. It was never seen by his friends, so far as I can learn, until after his death, when Sophia Thoreau gave it to me, along with other poems, for publication in the "Boston Commonwealth," in 1863. Since then it has been mentioned as a poem written in anticipation of death. This is not so; it was certainly written long before his illness. "In this roadstead I have ridden, In this covert I have hidden: Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me, And I hid beneath their lee. "This true people took the stranger, And warm-hearted housed the ranger; They received their roving guest, And have fed him with the best; "Whatsoe'er the land afforded To the stranger's wish accorded,-- Shook the olive, stripped the vine, And expressed the strengthening wine. "And by night they did spread o'er him What by day they spread before him; That good will which was repast Was his covering at last. "The stranger moored him to their pier Without anxiety or fear; By day he walked the sloping land,-- By night the gentle heavens he scanned. "When first his bark stood inland To the coast of that far Finland, Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore, The weary mariner to restore. "And still he stayed from day to day, If he their kindness might repay; But more and more The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore. "And still, the more the stranger waited, The less his argosy was freighted; And still the more he stayed, The less his debt was paid. "So he unfurled his shrouded mast To receive the fragrant blast,-- And that same refreshing gale Which had woo'd him to remain Again and again;-- It was that filled his sail And drove him to the main. "All day the low hung clouds Dropped tears into the sea, And the wind amid the shrouds Sighed plaintively." CHAPTER XII. POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER. The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name,--as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind tended naturally to the ideal side. He would have been an idealist in any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined every wide prospect and every narrow cranny in which his active, patient spirit pursued its task. It was this inward illumination as well as the star-like beam of Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused Thoreau to write in his senior year at college, "This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful," and he cherished this belief through life. In youth, too, he said, "The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means." It was in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:-- "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." In the same significance read his little-known verses, "The Pilgrims." "When I have slumbered I have heard sounds As of travelers passing These my grounds. "'T was a sweet music Wafted them by, I could not tell If afar off or nigh. "Unless I dreamed it This was of yore; I never told it To mortal before. "Never remembered But in my dreams, What to me waking A miracle seems." It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical expression, copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece. This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have. After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this the judgment of Mr. Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson, who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his own? "Light winged smoke, Icarian bird! Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,-- * * * * * Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame." No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses sure to survive for centuries. As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:-- "Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is not too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high. She is persuasive, not litigious, leaving conscience to decide. She never sacrificeth her dignity that she may secure for herself a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious about appearances." In another essay of the same year he wrote:-- "The order of things should be reversed: the seventh should be man's day of toil, in which to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature." This was an anticipation of his theory of labor and leisure set forth in "Walden," where he says:-- "For more than five years I maintained myself solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living; the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I found that the occupation of day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in the year to support one." This was true of Thoreau, because, as he said, his "greatest skill had been to want but little." In him this economy was a part of morality, or even of religion. "The high moral impulse," says Channing, "never deserted him, and he resolved early to read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself." How early this austerity appeared in what he wrote, has been little noticed; but I discover it in his earliest college essays, before he was eighteen years old. Thus, in such a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs:-- "There appears to be something noble, something exalted, in giving up one's own interest for that of his fellow-beings. He is a true patriot, who, casting aside all selfish thoughts, and not suffering his benevolent intentions to be polluted by thinking of the fame he is acquiring, presses forward in the great work he has undertaken, with unremitted zeal; who is as one pursuing his way through a garden abounding with fruits of every description, without turning aside, or regarding the brambles which impede his progress, but pressing onward with his eyes fixed upon the golden fruit before him. He is worthy of all praise; his is, indeed, true greatness." In contrast with this man the young philosopher sets before us the man who wishes, as the Greeks said, _pleonektein_,--to get more than his square meal at the banquet of life. "Aristocrats may say what they please,--liberty and equal rights are and ever will be grateful, till nature herself shall change; and he who is ambitious to exercise authority over his fellow-beings, with no view to their benefit or injury, is to be regarded as actuated by peculiarly selfish motives. Self-gratification must be his sole object. Perhaps he is desirous that his name may be handed down to posterity; that in after ages something more may be said of him than that he lived and died. His deeds may never be forgotten; but is this greatness? If so, may I pass through life unheeded and unknown!" What was his own ambition--a purpose in life which only the unthinking could ever confound with selfishness--was expressed by him early in a prayer which he threw into this verse:-- "Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf, Than that I may not disappoint myself; That in my conduct I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practice more than my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I thy purpose did not know, Or overrated thy designs." And it may be said of him that he acted this prayer as well as uttered it. Says Channing again:-- "In our estimate of his character, the moral qualities form the basis; for himself rigidly enjoined; if in another, he could overlook delinquency. Truth before all things; in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest purity, the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith in friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right, which nothing can tease or purchase out of us." Thus it is said that when he went to prison rather than pay his tax, which went to support slavery in South Carolina, and his friend Emerson came to the cell and said, "Henry, why are you here?" the reply was, "Why are you _not_ here?" In this act, which even his best friends at first denounced as "mean and sneaking and in bad taste,"--this refusal to pay the trifling sum demanded of him by the Concord tax-gatherer,--the outlines of his political philosophy appear. They were illuminated afterwards by his trenchant utterances in denunciation of slavery and in encomium of John Brown, who attacked that monster in its most vulnerable part. It was not mere whim, but a settled theory of human nature and the institution of government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce the parish church and refuse to pay its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State and refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward, first of all men, in public support of Brown and his Virginia campaign. This theory found frequent expression in his lectures. In 1846 he said:-- "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." And again:-- "I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten _honest_ men only,--ay, if one honest man, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation. In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839. Thoreau said:-- "Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution (of government) never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical; still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of government?" Such a legislator, proclaiming his law from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:-- "I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right." Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the man. "For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, "we are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that power which establishes justice in the land." Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher. The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial. CHAPTER XIII. LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY. The life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership,--not of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so that he could write--to use his own words--"sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of writing coveted by him; "sentences which are expressive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across,--not mere repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build." It was this thirst for final and concentrated expression, and not love of fame, or "literary aspirations," as poor Greeley put it, which urged him on to write. For printing he cared little,--and few authors since Shakespeare have been less anxious to publish what they wrote. Of the seven volumes of his works first printed, and twenty more which may be published some day, only two, "The Week" and "Walden," appeared in his lifetime,--though the material for two more had been scattered about in forgotten magazines and newspapers, for his friends to collect after his death. Of his first works (and some of his best) it could be said, as Thomas Wharton said, in 1781, of his friend Gray's verses, "I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, 'The Progress of Poetry' and 'The Bard' met with at their first publication; it appeared there were not twenty people in England who liked them." This disturbed Thoreau's friends, but not himself; he rather rejoiced in the slow sale of his first book; and when the balance of the edition,--more than seven hundred copies out of one thousand,--came back upon his hands unsold in 1855, and earlier, he told me with glee that he had made an addition of seven hundred volumes to his library, and all of his own composition. "O solitude, obscurity, meanness!" he exclaims in 1856 to his friend Blake, "I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbors' eyes." Of course, pride had something to do with this; "it was a wild stock of pride," as Burke said of Lord Keppel, "on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues." Both pride and piety led him to write,-- "Fame cannot tempt the bard Who's famous with his God, Nor laurel him reward Who has his Maker's nod." Though often ranked as an unbeliever, and too scornful in some of his expressions concerning the religion of other men, Thoreau was in truth deeply religious. Sincerity and devotion were his most marked traits; and both are seen in his verses from the same poem ("Inspiration") so often quoted:-- "I will then trust the love untold Which not my worth or want hath bought,-- Which wooed me young and wooes me old, And to this evening hath me brought." Thoreau's business in life was observation, thought, and writing, to which last, reading was essential. He read much, but studied more; nor was his reading that indiscriminate, miscellaneous perusal of everything printed, which has become the vice of this age. He read books of travel, scientific books, authors of original merit, but few newspapers, of which he had a very poor opinion. "Read not the 'Times,' read the Eternities," he said. Nor did he admire the magazines, or their editors, greatly. He quarreled with "Putnam's Magazine," in 1853-54, and in 1858, after yielding to the suggestion of Mr. Emerson, that he should contribute to the "Atlantic," in consequence of a dispute with Mr. Lowell, its editor, about the omission of a sentence in one of his articles, he published no more in that magazine until the year of his death (1862), when Mr. Fields obtained from him some of his choicest manuscripts. He spent the last months of his life in revising these, and they continued to appear for some years after his death. Those which were published in the "Atlantic" in 1878 are passages from his journals, selected by his friend Blake, who long had the custody of his manuscripts. These consist chiefly of his journals in thirty-nine volumes, many parts of which had already been printed, either by Thoreau himself, by his sister Sophia, or his friend Channing, who, in 1873, published a life of Thoreau, containing many extracts from the journals, which had never before been printed. When we speak of his works, we should include Mr. Channing's book also, half of which, at least, is from Thoreau's pen. His method in writing was peculiarly his own, though it bore some external resemblance to that of his friends, Emerson and Alcott. Like them he early began to keep a journal, which became both diary and commonplace book. But while they noted down the thoughts which occurred to them, without premeditation or consecutive arrangement, Thoreau made studies and observations for his journal as carefully and habitually as he noted the angles and distances in surveying a Concord farm. In all his daily walks and distant journeys, he took notes on the spot of what occurred to him, and these, often very brief and symbolic, he carefully wrote out, as soon as he could get time, in his diary, not classified by topics, but just as they had come to him. To these he added his daily meditations, sometimes expressed in verse, especially in the years between 1837 and 1850, but generally in close and pertinent prose. Many details are found in his diaries, but not such as are common in the diaries of other men,--not trivial but significant details. From these daily entries he made up his essays, his lectures, and his volumes; all being slowly, and with much deliberation and revision, brought into the form in which he gave them to the public. After that he scarcely changed them at all; they had received the last imprint of his mind, and he allowed them to stand and speak for themselves. But before printing, they underwent constant change, by addition, erasure, transposition, correction, and combination. A given lecture might be two years, or twenty years in preparation; or it might be, like his defense of John Brown, copied with little change from the pages of his diary for the fortnight previous. But that was an exceptional case; and Thoreau was stirred and quickened by the campaign and capture of Brown, as perhaps he had never been before. "The thought of that man's position and fate," he said, "is spoiling many a man's day here at the North for other thinking. If any one who has seen John Brown in Concord, can pursue successfully any other train of thought, I do not know what he is made of. If there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, I will warrant him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or purse. I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent." The fact that Thoreau noted down his thoughts by night as well as by day, appears also from an entry in one of his journals, where he is describing the coming on of day, as witnessed by him at the close of a September night in Concord. "Some bird flies over," he writes, "making a noise like the barking of a puppy (it was a cuckoo). It is yet so dark that I have dropped my pencil and cannot find it." No writer of modern times, in fact, was so much awake and abroad at night, or has described better the phenomena of darkness and of moonlight. It is interesting to note some dates and incidents concerning a few of Thoreau's essays. The celebrated chapter on "Friendship," in the "Week," was written in the winter of 1847-48, soon after he left Walden, and while he was a member of Mr. Emerson's household during the absence of his friend in Europe. On the 13th of January, 1848, Mr. Alcott notes in his diary:-- "Henry Thoreau came in after my hours with the children, and we had a good deal of talk on the modes of popular influence. He read me a manuscript essay of his on 'Friendship,' which he has just written, and which I thought superior to anything I had heard." To the same period or a little later belong those verses called "The Departure," which declare, under a similitude, Thoreau's relations with one family of his friends. In 1843, when he first met Henry James, Lucretia Mott, and others who have since been famous, in the pleasant seclusion of Staten Island, he wrote a translation of the "Seven Against Thebes," which has never been printed, some translations from Pindar, printed in the "Dial," in 1844, and two articles for the New York "Democratic Review," called "Paradise to be Regained," and "The Landlord." Thoreau left "a vast amount of manuscript," in the words of his sister, who was his literary executor until her death in 1876, when she committed her trust to his Worcester friend, Mr. Harrison Blake. She was aided in the revision and publication of the "Excursions," "Maine Woods," "Letters," and other volumes which she issued from 1862 to 1866, by Mr. Emerson, Mr. Channing, and other friends,--Mr. Emerson having undertaken that selection of letters and poems from his mass of correspondence and his preserved verses, which appeared in 1865. His purpose, as he said to Miss Thoreau, was to exhibit in that volume "a most perfect piece of stoicism," and he fancied that she had "marred his classic statue" by inserting some tokens of natural affection which the domestic letters showed. Miss Thoreau said that "it did not seem quite honest to Henry" to leave out such passages; Mr. Fields, the publisher, agreed with her, and a few of them were retained. His correspondence, as a whole, is much more affectionate, and less pugnacious than would appear from the published volume. He was fond of dispute, but those who knew him best loved him most. Of his last illness his sister said:-- "It was not possible to be sad in his presence. No shadow of gloom attaches to anything in my mind connected with my precious brother. He has done much to strengthen the faith of his friends. Henry's whole life impresses me as a grand miracle." Walking once with Mr. Alcott, soon after he passed his eightieth birth day, as we faced the lovely western sky in December, the old Pythagorean said, "I always think of Thoreau when I look at a sunset;" and I then remembered it was at that hour Thoreau usually walked along the village street, under the arch of trees, with the sunset sky seen through their branches. "He said to me in his last illness," added Alcott, "'I shall leave the world without a regret,'--that was the saying either of a grand egotist or of a deeply religious soul." Thoreau was both, and both his egotism and his devotion offended many of those who met him. His aversion to the companionship of men was partly religious--a fondness for the inward life--and partly egotism and scorn for frivolity. "Emerson says his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part," writes Thoreau in 1854, "that he is driven to all sorts of resources,--and among the rest to men. I tell him we differ only in our resources: mine is to get away from men. They very rarely affect me as grand or beautiful; but I know that there is a sunrise and a sunset every day. I have seen more men than usual lately; and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are." In 1859 he wrote to Mr. Blake:-- "I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for _the sake of society_; as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say. They have got a club, the handle of which is in the Parker House, at Boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, expecting to make me tender, or minced meat, and so fit for a club to dine off. The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it! First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got." Yet Thoreau knew the value of society, and avoided it oftentimes only because he was too busy. To his friend Ricketson, who reproached him for ceasing to answer letters, he wrote in November, 1860, just before he took the fatal cold that terminated in consumption and ended his life prematurely:-- "FRIEND RICKETSON,--You know that I never promised to correspond with you, and so, when I do, I do more than I promised. Such are my pursuits and habits, that I rarely go abroad; and it is quite a habit with me to decline invitations to do so. Not that I could not enjoy such visits, if I were not otherwise occupied. I have enjoyed very much my visits to you, and my rides in your neighborhood, and am sorry that I cannot enjoy such things oftener; but life is short, and there are other things also to be done. I admit that you are more social than I am, and more attentive to 'the common courtesies of life;' but this is partly for the reason that you have fewer or less exacting private pursuits. Not to have written a note for a year is with me a very venial offense. I think I do not correspond with any one so often as once in six months. I have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to; but I suppose I had no new or particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement. I have felt that you would be glad to see me almost whenever I got ready to come; but I only offer myself as a rare visitor, and a still rarer correspondent. I am very busy, after my fashion, little as there is to show for it, and feel as if I could not spend many days nor dollars in traveling; for the shortest visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the weeks, you know. "Nevertheless, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. Please remember me to your family. I have a very pleasant recollection of your fireside, and I trust that I shall revisit it; also of your shanty and the surrounding regions." He did make a last visit to this friend in August, 1861, after his return from Minnesota, whither he went with young Horace Mann, in June. And it was to Mr. Ricketson that Sophia Thoreau, two weeks after her brother's death, wrote the following account of his last illness:-- "CONCORD, _May 20, 1862_. "DEAR FRIEND,--Profound joy mingles with my grief. I feel as if something very beautiful had happened,--not death. Although Henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me. My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him who made him, and who has now called him to labor in more glorious fields than earth affords! "You ask for some particulars relating to Henry's illness. I feel like saying that Henry was never affected, never reached by it. I never before saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. Very often I have heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. He remarked to me that there was as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health, the mind always conforming to the condition of the body. The thought of death, he said, could not begin to trouble him. His thoughts had entertained him all his life, and did still. When he had wakeful nights, he would ask me to arrange the furniture, so as to make fantastic shadows on the wall, and he wished his bed was in the form of a shell that he might curl up in it. He considered occupation as necessary for the sick as for those in health, and has accomplished a vast amount of labor during the past few months, in preparing some papers for the press. He did not cease to call for his manuscript till the last day of his life. During his long illness I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us. His perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, 'Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go.' Henry replied, 'When I was a very little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course, I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.' "There is very much that I should like to write you about my precious brother had I time and strength. I wish you to know how very gentle, lovely, and submissive he was in all his ways. His little study bed was brought down into our front parlor, when he could no longer walk with our assistance, and every arrangement pleased him. The devotion of his friends was most rare and touching. His room was made fragrant by the gifts of flowers from young and old. Fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts, were sent him. It was really pathetic, the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. Total strangers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done them. All this attention was fully appreciated and very gratifying to Henry. He would sometimes say, 'I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much has been done for me. I could never repay my friends.' And they remembered him to the last. Only about two hours before he left us, Judge Hoar called with a bouquet of hyacinths fresh from his garden, which Henry smelt and said he liked, and a few minutes after he was gone another friend came with a dish of his favorite jelly. I can never be grateful enough for the gentle, easy exit which was granted him. At seven o'clock, Tuesday morning, he became restless, and desired to be moved. Dear Mother, aunt Louisa, and myself were with him. His self-possession did not forsake him. A little after eight he asked to be raised quite up. His breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle, he left us at nine o'clock,--but not alone; our Heavenly Father was with us. "Your last letter reached us by the evening mail on Monday. Henry asked me to read it to him, which I did. He enjoyed your letters, and felt disappointed not to see you again. Mr. Blake and Mr. Brown came twice to visit him, since January. They were present at his funeral, which took place in the church. Mr. Emerson read such an address as no other man could have done. It is a source of great satisfaction that one so gifted knew and loved my brother, and is prepared to speak such brave words about him at this time. The 'Atlantic Monthly' for July will contain Mr. Emerson's memories of Henry. I hope that you saw a notice of the services on Friday, written by Mr. Fields, in the 'Transcript.' "Let me thank you for your very friendly letters. I trust we shall see you in Concord, Anniversary Week. It would give me pleasure to make the acquaintance of your family, of whom my brother has so often told me. If convenient, will you please bring the ambrotype of Henry which was taken last autumn in New Bedford. I am interested to see it. Mr. Channing will take the crayon likeness to Boston this week to secure some photographs. My intention was to apologize for not writing you at this time; but I must now trust to your generosity to pardon this hasty letter, written under a great pressure of cares and amidst frequent interruptions. My mother unites with me in very kind regards to your family. "Yours truly, "S. E. THOREAU." To Parker Pillsbury, who would fain talk with Thoreau in this last winter concerning the next world, the reply was, "One world at a time." To a young friend (Myron Benton) he wrote a few weeks before death:-- "CONCORD, _March 21, 1862_. "DEAR SIR,--I thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since I received it, I have intended to answer before I died, however briefly. I am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, I have not written my books in vain. I was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, 'I wish you would write another book--write it for me.' He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself. I am pleased when you say that in 'The Week' you like especially 'those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book;' for these, I suppose, are the least attractive to most readers. I have not been engaged in any particular work on Botany, or the like, though, if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally. "You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_ that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add, that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. "Yours truly, HENRY D. THOREAU, "By SOPHIA E. THOREAU." "With an unfaltering trust in God's mercies," wrote Ellery Channing, "and never deserted by his good genius, he most bravely and unsparingly passed down the inclined plane of a terrible malady--pulmonary consumption; working steadily at the completing of his papers to his last hours, or so long as he could hold the pencil in his trembling fingers. Yet if he did get a little sleep to comfort him in this year's campaign of sleepless affliction, he was sure to interest those about him in his singular dreams, more than usually fantastic. He said once, that having got a few moments of repose, 'sleep seemed to hang round his bed in festoons.' He declared uniformly that he preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics. His patience was unfailing; assuredly he knew not aught save resignation; he did mightily cheer and console those whose strength was less. His every instant now, his least thought and work, sacredly belonged to them, dearer than his rapidly perishing life, whom he should so quickly leave behind." Once or twice he shed tears. Upon hearing a wandering musician in the street playing some tune of his childhood he might never hear again, he wept, and said to his mother, "Give him some money for me!" "Northward he turneth through a little door, And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue, Flattered to tears this aged man and poor; But no--already had his death-bell rung, The joys of all his life were said and sung." He died on the 6th of May, 1862, and had a public funeral from the parish church a few days later. On his coffin his friend Channing placed several inscriptions, among them this, "Hail to thee, O man! who hast come from the transitory place to the imperishable." This sentiment may stand as faintly marking Thoreau's deep, vital conviction of immortality, of which he never had entertained a doubt in his life. There was in his view of the world and its Maker no room for doubt; so that when he was once asked, superfluously, what he thought of a future world and its compensations, he replied, "Those were voluntaries I did not take,"--having confined himself to the foreordained course of things. He is buried in the village cemetery, quaintly named "Sleepy Hollow," with his family and friends about him; one of whom, surviving him for a few years, said, as she looked upon his low head-stone on the hillside, "Concord is Henry's monument, covered with suitable inscriptions by his own hand." INDEX. Academy, Concord, 46. Acton, originally a part of Concord, 32. Adams, John Quincy, 78. Adams, Samuel, 100. African Slaves in Concord, 203-205. Agassiz, Louis, 115, 243, 245. Agricola at Marseilles, 64. Alcott, A. Bronson, sonnet on Thoreau, v.; born in Connecticut, 63; at Concord Lyceum, 49; visits Dr. Ripley, 80; in old age, 81; goes to live in Concord, 117; helps "raise" Thoreau's hut, 118; his School of Philosophy, 121; an early Transcendentalist, 124; his Paradise at Fruitlands, 134-140; a friend of John Brown, 148; plan of living in Concord woods, 155; builds a summer-house for Emerson, 194; his friendship with Thoreau, 186; his conversations, 187, 188, 190, 199; from his diary, 192, 195, 304; peddler in Virginia, 187, 260; visits Horace Greeley, 188; harbors a fugitive slave, 195; lends Thoreau his axe, 209; goes to the opera with Greeley, 241; with Thoreau in New Bedford, 267; his opinion of Thoreau, 306. Alcott, Louisa, 63, 91. Allston, Washington, visits Concord, 111. American literature, Thoreau's view of, 160. American Slavery, Thoreau's opposition to, 195, 199, 292; John Brown's attack upon, 292, 303. Assabet River, 15, 33, 114, 202. Ball, B. W., 135. Bangor, 1, 5, 245. Barnes, Lucy, 109, 110. Barrett, Humphrey, a Concord farmer, 89, 98, 103, 107. Barrett, Joseph, 114-117. Bartlett, Dr. Josiah, 43, 44. Bartlett, Robert, 190. Bedford (the town), 9, 12. Bedford road, 12, 270. Betsey (Thoreau), 3, 4. Bigelow, Dr. H. J., 62. Blake, Harrison, 141, 301, 305, 307. Bliss, Rev. Daniel, 74, 75, 99, 100. Bliss, Daniel, the Tory, 100, 204. Bliss, Phebe, 75, 205. Boston, the home of John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, 2, 6; of Henry Thoreau, 27; birth-place of Emerson, 63. Boston Miscellany, 220. Bowen, Prof. Francis, 62. Bradford, George P., 46. Bradford, Gershom, 105. Bremer, Frederika, 141. Brisbane, Albert, 133, 134. Brister's Hill, 202. Brister, a freedman, 203, 205, 208. Brook Farm, 134, 141. Brooks, Nathan, 42, 46, 77, 105, 112. Brooks, Mrs. Nathan, 68. Brown, John, of Osawatomie, 146, 185, 199, 242, 292, 293, 295, 303. Brown, Mrs., of Plymouth, 60. Brownson, Orestes A., 53. Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 208. Bulkley family in Concord, 33, 39, 98. Burke, Edmund, quoted, 299. Buttrick, Major, 102. Cambridge, Thoreau's residence in, 51; letters from, 56, 61; Thoreau's visit to, 196. Campbell, Sir Archibald, 68. Canada, Thoreau's excursion to, 233, 235. Cape Cod, 236, 264. Carlyle, Thomas, 124, 125, 193, 233; Thoreau's essay on, 218-224. Channing, Rev. Dr., 80, 82, 144. Channing, Ellery (the poet), 11, 41, 49-51, 63, 70, 135, 136, 177-189; his lines on Emerson, 69; on Thoreau, 185, 214; quoted, 49-51; his friendship for Thoreau, 178-185; his verses on Hawthorne, 188; his house, 198; his letters to Thoreau, 209, 218; calls Thoreau Idolon, 252; and Rudolpho, 253; visits Monadnoc, 255; describes Thoreau, 262, 267, 291, 315; his biography of Thoreau, 11, 49, 301. Channing, Rev. W. H., 140, 141, 174, 216. Chapman, Dr., 193. Chappaqua, 241. Cheney, Mrs., of Concord, 18, 93. Cohasset, 91, 175. Columella, 132. Concord (town of) described, 32-40; celebrities, 41-48, 63-96; farmers, 97-123; Lyceum, 47, 48, 168; as a transcendental capital, 135, 143, 146; the home of Channing and Thoreau, 178; localities, 201-204; freedmen, 204; jail, 207; the monument to Thoreau, 317. Concord Fight, 76, 86, 99, 102, 109. Concord grape, 34. Concord River, 33, 140, 154, 167, 176, 178, 183, 188, 199, 202, 208. Concord Village, 189, 201; trade in, 35; customs of, 40, 46, 48, 64, 72, 76, 87, 116, 122. Connecticut, 73, 82, 127, 186. Corner, Nine-Acre, 70, 84, 208. Davenant, Sir William, 127, 164. "Departure, The," 282, 305. Dial, The, 127, 135, 163, 168, 171, 173, 212, 217, 248. Diana, Ascription to, 260. Dunbar, Rev. Asa, 8, 9, 20. Dunbar, Charles, uncle of Thoreau, 21-24, 92, 93. Dunbar, Cynthia (mother of Thoreau), 8, 18, 19, 21, 24-28, 50, 57, 92, 96, 312. Dunbar, Louisa, 13-17, 21. Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 128. "Egomites," 80. Emerson, Charles, 46. Emerson, Miss Mary, 19, 20, 75. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, born in Boston, 63; a descendant of Concord ministers, 39; quoted, 37; began to lecture in Concord, 48; begins acquaintance with Thoreau, 59; goes to live in Concord, 69; draws people there, 71; describes Dr. Ripley, 77-84; describes the "Concord Fight," 103; on Captain Hardy, 121, 123; goes to Europe, 281; his "Forester," 251; his proposition for an international magazine, 193; on Thoreau's acquaintance with Nature, 251, 252; on Thoreau's patience in observation, 250; his relations with Thoreau, 189; his summer-house, 194, 278; tries to work in the woods, 278; praises Thoreau's "Smoke," 287; gives his funeral eulogy, 313. Emerson, William, 190. Endymion of Concord, 260. Essays of Thoreau, in college, 150-163; "Effect of Story Telling," 158; "L'Allegro and Il Penseroso," 156; "National Characteristics," 160; "Paley's Common Reasons," 161; "Punishment," 158; "Source of our feeling for the Sublime," 159; "Simplicity of Style," 156. Everett, Edward, 88. Fairhaven Cliffs, 153. Fenda, the fortune teller, 204. Fields, James T., 300, 306. Forbes, Mrs. W. H., recollections of Thoreau, 270-273. "Forester, The," verse by Emerson, 257. "Fruitlands," in Harvard, 135-137. Fugitive Slave, in Concord, 195. Fuller, Margaret, in Concord, 70; criticises Thoreau's poems, 169-172; rejects a prose article by him, 173; her character, 174; in Cambridge, 191; at a conversation, 190; visit to Europe, marriage, and death, 230; writes for the "Tribune," and lives with H. Greeley, 217. Gardiner, Dr., 79, 80. Garfield, his ancestors, 204. Gilman, Rev. Nicholas, 128-130. Goodwin, Rev. H. B., 83. Graham, George R., 222, 224. Graham's Magazine, 213, 224. Graveyard in Lincoln, 204. Greeley, Horace, as Mæcenas, 217; editor of the "Tribune," 216; described by Margaret Fuller, 217; his correspondence with Thoreau, 219-229, 231-240; invites Thoreau to Chappaqua, satirized by W. E. Channing, 218. Griswold, R. W., 220, 222. Hafiz, quoted, 166. Hamilton, Alexander, 113. Hampden, John, 107. Hardy, Captain, 120-122. Harvard Magazine, 196. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, moves and removes to Concord, 70; quoted, 71; Channing's verses on, 188; Emerson's influence on, 148; his "Scarlet Letter," 277; invites Thoreau to lecture in Salem, 276; returns to Concord, 278; returns thither from Europe, 189. Herald's Office, London, 108. Heywood, Dr. Abiel, 38, 40-42. Heywood, George, 39. Hildreth, S. T., 57. Hoar, E. R., 90, 312. Hoar, Edward, 254. Hoar, Miss Elizabeth, 239. Hoar, Mrs. Samuel, 96. Hoar, Samuel, 46, 72, 90, 95, 112. Hollowell Farm, 172, _note_, 208. Hosmer Cottage, 117. Hosmer, Cyrus, 111. Hosmer, Edmund, 118-120. Hosmer, James, 98. Hosmer, Joseph (the Major), 98, 99, 100, 109, 111, 112, 113. Hosmer, Lucy, 110. Hurd, Dr. Isaac, 42. Icarus, 202. Indians, (American), 240, 242, 248. Ingraham, Cato, a slave, 203. Ingraham, Duncan, 66-68. Jack, John, a negro, 204; epitaph on, 205. Jackson, Dr. C. T., 246, 247. James, Henry, 305. Jarvis, Deacon Francis, 76, 77. Jarvis, Dr. Edward, 76. Jersey, Isle of, 1-4. Journal of Thoreau, 2, 150, 154, 167. Ktaadn, and Thoreau's visit there, 226, 227, 228, 245. Keene, N. H., 18. Kosta, Martin, 67. Lane, Charles, 135-141. Lee family, 114; their farm and hill, 115. Letters from Maria Thoreau, 5; from D. Webster, 15; from Josiah Quincy, 53, 61; from Dr. Ripley, 57, 81; from Dr. Channing to Dr. Ripley, 82; from Charles Lane, to Thoreau, 137-140; from A. G. Peabody, 55, 56; from R. W. Emerson, 155, 193; from F. B. Sanborn, 197; from Henry Thoreau, 92, 181, 209, 210, 216, 307, 308, 314; from Horace Greeley, 219, 222-231, 233-240; from Margaret Fuller, 169-173; from Dr. Ripley, 144-146; from Sophia Thoreau, 176, 268, 306, 310, 314; letter to Sophia Thoreau, 189, 216, 281. Levet, Robert, 43. Lowell, James Russell, 112, 246. Mæcenas, Greeley as, 216-241. Manse, Old, built in 1766, 75; occupied by Hawthorne 85; Channing's verses on, 188; farmers at, 86-88; "Mosses from," 183; first mistress of, 205. Marlboro road, 109. Marryatt, Captain, 67. Marvell, Andrew, 42. Massey, Gerald, 240. Merrick, Tilly, 67, 108. Milton, John, 156, 157. Minott, George, 22, 24, 92, 274. Minott, Mrs., the grandmother of Thoreau, 9-11. Minute-Man, statue of, 86. Monadnoc, 115, 254-257. Moore, Abel ("Captain Hardy"), 120, 121. Morton, Edwin, 197. Munroe of Lexington and Concord, 66; William, 37, 152. Musketaquid, 33. Nature, "born and brought up in Concord," 96; Thoreau's observation of, 252, 285. Orrok, David, 2. Orrok, Sarah, 2. Out-door life of Thoreau, at Walden, 209, 211; in general, 242, 243, 249-252, 264-267; by night, 304. Parker, Theodore, 69; school candidate, 88. "Past and Present," by Carlyle, notice of, 217. Peabody, A. G., letter from, 54. Peabody, Elizabeth P., 70, 168. Penobscot River, 245. Pepperell, Sir William, 129. Perry, Joseph, 67. Phalanstery, 140, 141, 216. Phillips, Wendell, at Concord, 49. Pierpont, Sarah, 128. Pillsbury, Parker, 314. Poems, quoted from Tennyson, 31; from Ellery Channing, 24, 69, 119, 176, 184, 185, 215, 252, 255; Emerson's "Saadi", 119; "Maine Woods," 246, 247; Milton, 181; Thoreau's "Love," 167; "Sympathy," 164; "The Maiden in the East," 165; to his brother John, 176; The Departure, 282; "The Pilgrims," 285; "Smoke" (a fragment), 287; from T. P. Sanborn, 260; from Keats, 316. Poet, the character of, 284. Ponkawtassett Hill, 86, 182. Putnam's Magazine, 236, 237. Quarterly, Massachusetts, 230. Quincy, Josiah, 52; letter from, 53, 61; certificate in favor of Thoreau, 61. Ralston, Mrs. Laura Dunbar, 19. Ricketson, Daniel, 176, 188, 263; description of Thoreau's actual appearance, 266; disappointment in imagined personal appearance of Thoreau, 264; on Thoreau's domestic character, 267; describes Thoreau's dance, 268; Letters from Thoreau to, 308, 309; Letter from Sophia Thoreau to, 310. Ripley, Dr. (pastor at Concord), petition to Grand Lodge of Masons, 1-9; letter from, 25; certificate in favor of Thoreau's father, 26; schism in parish of, 28, 85; Thoreau baptized by, 45; letter from Edward Everett to, 47; letter introducing Thoreau as a teacher, 57; anecdotes of, 73-80, 86, 87; letter to Dr. Channing, 81; reply, 82; his prayers, 83, 84; letter on the Transcendental movement, 144, 146. Ripley, Rev. Samuel, 74. Ripley, Mrs. Sarah, 85. Robbins, Cæsar, a negro, 104, 203. Sanborn, F. B., acquaintance with Thoreau, 196; extract from diary, 198, 199; introduces John Brown to Thoreau, 199; letter to Thoreau, 197. Sanborn, T. P., his "Endymion" quoted, 260. Sartain, John, 232. "Service, The," 172. Sewall, Ellen, 163. "Shay," a one-horse, 131-133. Slave, fugitive, 195. Staten Island, 89, 92, 305. Sunday prospect, 152. Sunday walkers, 85. Tacitus, quoted, 64. Teufelsdröckh, 210. Thoreau family, 4, 5, 27-31. Thoreau, Helen, 59-61. Thoreau, Henry, his ancestry, 1-10; born in Concord, 12; his mother, 8, 24; his father, 25; as a pencil-maker, 37; first dwelling-place, 45; at the Concord Academy, 46; enters Harvard College, 46; at Chelmsford, 49; his childish stoicism, 50; his graduation, 51; as school teacher, 52; a beneficiary of Harvard College, 53, 54; his certificate from Dr. Ripley, 57, 58; from Emerson, 59; beginning of acquaintance with Emerson, 59; his "Sic Vita," 60; Quincy's certificate, 61; a Transcendentalist, 124; first essays in authorship, 149, 153; description of a visit to Fairhaven Cliffs, 153, 154; his early poems, 164-167; his first lecture, 168; his "Walk to Wachusett," 169; his earliest companion, 175; his friendship with Ellery Channing, 178-183; his praise of Alcott, 186; goes to Alcott's conversations, 187; visits Chappaqua and Walt Whitman, 188; his burial place, 189; his relation with Emerson, 189, 190; reads his "Week" to Alcott, 192; designs a lodge for Emerson, 194; his acquaintance with Sanborn, 195; at Walden, 201; his reasons for going to Walden, 212; edits "The Week," 212; talks with W. H. Channing and Greeley, 216; his essay on Carlyle, 218-225; his paper on "Ktaadn" and the "Maine Woods," 225; his "Week," 230; asks Greeley for a loan, 235; his "Canada," and "Cape Cod," 235, 236; Greeley asks him to become a tutor, 241; his out-door life, 242; collects specimens for Agassiz, 243, 245; his visits to Maine, 245, 248; as a naturalist, 249-252; a night on Mount Washington, 254; his Monadnoc trip, 256-257; his description of a Concord heifer, 258, 259; his apostrophe to the "Queen of Night," 259; his face, 199, 261, 266; described by Channing, 262; by Ricketson, 263-266; travels on Cape Cod, 264; domestic character, 267; dances, 268; sings "Tom Bowline," 269; his social traits, 270-273; as author and lecturer, 274-277; his manual labor, 278; fashion of his garments, 279; income from authorship, 280; lives in Emerson's household, 281; his parable, 285; his habit of versification, 286; his reading, 286; as naturalist, 288-291; his theory of labor and leisure, 288; his political philosophy, 292; eras in his life, 297; his aim in writing, 298; his religion, 299; his business in life, 300; his method in writing, 304; his sunset walks, 307; his aversion to society, 307; his decline and death, 313-316; his funeral, 317. Thoreau, John, the father, 25, 27. Thoreau, John, the brother, 175, 178. Thoreau, John, the Jerseyman; 1, 5-7, 37. Thoreau, Maria, 1-8. Thoreau, Sophia, 29, 38, 44, 265, 282, 301, 305, 310, 315; letter from, 176, 268, 306, 310-314; letters to, 189, 216, 281. "Tom Bowline," sung by Thoreau, 268, 269, 272. Transcendentalism, 124, 126, 133, 142, 247, 279; in New England, 124-126; in politics, 292-296; social and unsocial, 141-145; at Brook Farm, 134; at Fruitlands, 137. Transcendentalists of Concord, 63, 70, 76, 80, 119, 134-137, 143, 146, 148, 288, 307. Transcendental Period, 124-147. "Tribune," New York, 217, 230, 238. Very, Jones, 51, 190. Wachusett, 115, 138, 169, 220. Walden (the book), 196, 211, 214, 239,240. Walden Hermitage, 201-215. Walden woods, 11, 155, 202, 209, 212, 214. Watson, Marston, 188, 197. Webster, Daniel, a lover of Louisa Dunbar, 13, 14; describes his native place, 15-17; his friendship for Louisa Dunbar, 17, 93; at the "Wyman Trial," 90; his "rose-cold," 91; visits in Concord, 93; letter to Mrs. Cheney, 94; described by Carlyle, 293; by Thoreau, 294; contrasted with Thoreau, 296. Webster, Prof. J. W., 56. "Week," The, (Thoreau's first book), 183, 196, 213, 230, 240, 299, 304. Weiss, Rev. John, 57. "Westminster Review," 240. Wharton, Thomas, 298. Whig Review, 238. Whitefield, G., letter to, 129. Whiting, Colonel, 36, 46. Whiting, Rev. John, 65. Whitman, Walt, 186, 188. Whittier, J. G., quoted, 131. Wigglesworth, Michael, 131. Willard, Major, 32, 98. Woolman, John, 127, 130. Zilpha, the Walden Circe, 203. AMERICAN STATESMEN Biographies of Men famous in the Political History of the United States. Edited by JOHN T. MORSE, JR. Each volume, with portrait, 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 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Mr. Alcott, who has now passed the age of eighty-two, has been for years doing in some degree what Dr. Channing urged the patriarch of his denomination to do, but which the old minister never found time and strength for. It is curious that these two venerable men, whose united life in Concord covers a period of more than a century, both came from Connecticut.] [Footnote 3: This princely anecdote is paralleled, in its way, by one told of Gershom Bradford, of Duxbury, son of Colonel Gam. Bradford, the friend of Washington and Kosciusko, but himself a plain Old Colony farmer. Once walking in his woods, he saw a man cutting down a fine tree; he concealed himself that the man might not see him, and went home. When asked why he did not stop the trespasser, he replied, "Could not the poor man have a tree?" Gershom Bradford was a descendant of Governor Bradford, the Pilgrim, and uncle of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, of Concord.] [Footnote 4: This would, of course, diminish his own share, as the law then stood, from one half the estate to one fourth, or less.] [Footnote 5: "These facts," says his biographer, whom I knew well, "show clearly, I think, not only that his love of right was stronger than his love of money, but that he would rather make any sacrifice of property than leave a doubt in his own mind whether justice had been done to others."] [Footnote 6: Lucy Barnes, daughter of Jonathan and Rachel Barnes of Marlborough, was born July 7, 1742, married Joseph Hosmer, of Concord, December 24, 1761, and died in Concord, ----, ----. Her brother was Rev. Jonathan Barnes, born in 1749, graduated at Harvard College, in 1770, and settled as a minister in Hillsborough, N. H., where he died in 1805.] [Footnote 7: The resemblance between some of John Woolman's utterances and those of Henry Thoreau has been noticed by Whittier, who says of the New Jersey Quaker, "From his little farm on the Rancocas he looked out with a mingled feeling of wonder and sorrow upon the hurry and unrest of the world; he regarded the merely rich man with unfeigned pity. With nothing of his scorn, he had all of Thoreau's commiseration for people who went about, bowed down with the weight of broad acres and great houses on their backs." The "scorn" of Thoreau and the "pity," of Woolman, sprang from a common root, however.] [Footnote 8: The Hollowell Place, no doubt.] [Footnote 9: In building this quaint structure, Thoreau was so averse to Mr. Alcott's plan of putting up and tearing down with no settled design of form on paper, that he withdrew his mechanic hand, so skillful in all carpenter work.] [Footnote 10: No such letter appears.] [Footnote 11: That is to say, a low price compared with what is now paid. As the letter courteously states some matters that have now become curious, it may be given:-- "PHILADELPHIA, _March 24, 1852_. "DEAR SIR,--I have read the articles of Mr. Thoreau forwarded by you, and will be glad to publish them if our terms are satisfactory. We generally pay for prose composition per printed page, and would allow him three dollars per page. We do not pay more than four dollars for any that we now engage. I did not suppose our maximum rate would have paid you (Mr. Greeley) for your lecture, and therefore requested to know your own terms. Of course, when an article is unusually desirable, we may deviate from rule; I now only mention ordinary arrangement. I was very sorry not to have your article, but shall enjoy the reading of it in Graham. Mr. T. might send us some further contributions, and shall at least receive prompt and courteous decision respecting them. Yours truly, "JOHN SARTAIN." It seems sad so candid and amiable a publisher should not have succeeded.] [Footnote 12: It was a "Primo Flauto" of his father's, who, like himself, was a sweet player on the flute, and had performed with that instrument in the parish choir, before the day of church-organs in Concord.] [Footnote 13: Thoreau says of this adventure: "After putting our packs under a rock, having a good hatchet, I proceeded to build a substantial house. This was done about dark, and by that time we were as wet as if we had stood in a hogshead of water. We then built a fire before the door, directly on the site of our camp of two years ago. Standing before this, and turning round slowly, like meat that is roasting, we were as dry, if not drier than ever, after a few hours, and so, at last, we turned in."] Transcriber's Notes Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected. Page 39: Changed "aniversary" to "anniversary." (Orig: two hundredth aniversary of the town settlement.) Footnote from Page 111: Dashes represent blank spaces of unrecorded death date. (Orig: and died in Concord, ----, ----.) Page 130: Changed "acknowlege" to "acknowledge." (Orig: to pure love, I may acknowlege with gratitude) Page 229: Changed "existnce" to "existence." (Orig: let common people know of his existnce.) Page 234: Changed "that" to "than." (Orig: make a use for them at this season that at any other.") 
16245	----	TEN YEARS' EXILE; Or Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Stael-Holstein, Written by Herself, during the Years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, and Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, by Her Son. Translated from the French London: Printed for Treuttel and Wurtz, Treuttel Jun. and Richter, Foreign Booksellers to his Royal Highness Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coberg, 30, Soho Square. 1821 Howlett & Brimmer, Printers, 10, Filth Street, Soho Square. PREFACE BY THE EDITOR (Augustus, Baron de Stael-Holstein.) The production which is now submitted to the reader, is not a complete work, and ought not to be criticized as such. It consists of Fragments of her Memoirs, which my mother had intended to complete at her leisure, and which would have probably undergone alterations, of the nature of which I am ignorant, if a longer life had been allowed her to revise and finish them. This reflection was sufficient to make me examine most scrupulously if I was authorized to give them publicity. The fear of any sort of responsibility cannot be present to the mind, when our dearest affections are in question; but the heart is agitated by a painful anxiety when we are left to guess at those wishes, the declaration of which would have been a sacred and invariable rule. Nevertheless, after having seriously reflected on what duty required of me, I am satisfied that I have fulfilled my mother's intentions, in engaging to leave out in this edition of her works*, no production susceptible of being printed. My fidelity in adhering to this engagement gives me the right of disavowing beforehand, all which at any future period, persons might pretend to add to this collection, which, I repeat, contains every thing, of which my mother had not formally forbid the publication. (* Les Oeuvres completes de Madame la Baronne de Stael, publiees par son Fils. Precedees d'une notice sur le caractere et les ecrits de Madame de Stael, par Madame Necker de Saussure. Paris, 17 vols. 8vo. and 17 vols. in 12mo.) The title of TEN YEARS' EXILE, is that of which the authoress herself made choice; I have deemed it proper to retain it, although the work, being unfinished, comprises only a period of seven years. The narrative begins in 1800, two years previous to my mother's first exile, and stops at 1804, after the death of M. Necker. It recommences in 1810, and breaks off abruptly at her arrival in Sweden, in the autumn of 1812. Between the first and second part of these Memoirs there is therefore an interval of nearly six years. An explanation of this will be found in a faithful statement of the manner in which they were composed. I will not anticipate my mother's narrative of the persecution to which she was subjected during the imperial government: that persecution, equally mean and cruel, forms the subject of the present publication, the interest of which I should only weaken. It will be sufficient for me to remind the reader, that after having exiled her from Paris, and subsequently sent her out of France, after having suppressed her work on Germany with the most arbitrary caprice, and made it impossible for her to publish anything, even on subjects wholly unconnected with politics; that government went so far as to make her almost a prisoner in her own residence, to forbid her all kind of travelling, and to deprive her of the pleasures of society and the consolations of friendship. It was while she was in this situation that my mother began her Memoirs, and one may readily conceive what must have been at that time the disposition of her mind. During the composition of the work, the hope of one day giving it to the world scarcely presented itself in the most distant futurity. Europe was still bent to that degree under the yoke of Napoleon, that no independent voice could make itself be heard: on the Continent the press was completely chained, and the most rigorous measures excluded every work printed in England. My mother thought less, therefore, of composing a book, than of preserving the traces of her recollections and ideas. Along with the narrative of circumstances personal to herself, she incorporated with it various reflections which were suggested to her, from the beginning of Bonaparte's power, by the state of France, and the progress of events. But if the printing such a work would at that time have been an act of unheard of temerity, the mere act of writing it required a great deal of both courage and prudence, particularly in the position in which she was placed. My mother had every reason to believe that all her movements were narrowly watched by the police: the prefect who had replaced M. de Barante at Geneva, pretended to be acquainted with every thing that passed in her house, and the least pretence would have been sufficient to induce them to possess themselves of her papers. She was obliged therefore, to take the greatest precautions. Scarcely had she written a few pages, when she made one of her most intimate friends transcribe them, taking care to substitute for the proper names those of persons taken from the history of the English Revolution. Under this disguise she carried off her manuscript, when in 1812 she determined to withdraw herself by flight from the rigors of a constantly increasing persecution. On her arrival in Sweden, after having travelled through Russia, and narrowly escaped the French armies advancing on Moscow, my mother employed herself in copying out fairly the first part of her Memoirs, which, as I have already mentioned, goes no farther than 1804. But prior to continuing them in the order of time, she wished to take advantage of the moment, during which her recollections were still strong, to give a narrative of the remarkable circumstances of her flight, and of the persecution which had rendered that step in a manner a duty. She resumed, therefore, the history of her life at the year 1810, the epoch of the suppression of her work on Germany, and continued it up to her arrival at Stockholm in 1812: from that was suggested the title of Ten Years' Exile. This explains also, why, in speaking of the imperial government, my mother expresses herself sometimes as living under its power, and at other times, as having escaped from it. Finally, after she had conceived the plan of her Considerations on the French Revolution, she extracted from the first part of Ten Years Exile, the historical passages and general reflections which entered into her new design, reserving the individual details for the period when she calculated on finishing the memoirs of her life, and when she flattered herself with being able to name all the persons of whom she had received generous proofs of friendship, without being afraid of compromising them by the expressions of her gratitude. The manuscript confided to my charge consisted therefore of two distinct parts: the first, the perusal of which necessarily offered less interest, contained several passages already incorporated in the Considerations on the French Revolution; the other formed a sort of journal, of which no part was yet known to the public. I have followed the plan traced by my mother, by striking out of the first part of the manuscript, all the passages which, with some modifications, have already found a place in her great political work. To this my labour as editor has been confined, and I have not allowed myself to make the slightest addition. The second part I deliver to the public exactly as I found it, without the least alteration, and I have scarcely felt myself entitled to make slight corrections of the style, so important did it appear to me to preserve in this sketch the entire vividness of its original character. A perusal of the opinions which she pronounces upon the political conduct of Russia, will satisfy every one of my scrupulous respect for my mother's manuscript; but without taking into account the influence of gratitude on elevated minds, the reader will not fail to recollect, that at that time the sovereign of Russia was fighting in the cause of liberty and independence. Was it possible to foresee that so few years would elapse before the immense forces of that empire should become the instruments of the oppression of unhappy Europe? If we compare the Ten Years' Exile with the Considerations on the French Revolution, it will perhaps be found that the reign of Napoleon is criticized in the first of these works with greater severity than in the other, and that he is there attacked with an eloquence not always exempt from bitterness. This difference may be easily explained: one of these works was written after the fall of the despot, with the calm and impartiality of the historian; the other was inspired by a courageous feeling of resistance to tyranny; and at the period of its composition, the imperial power was at its height. I have not selected one moment in preference to another for the publication of Ten Years' Exile; the chronological order has been followed in this edition, and the posthumous works are naturally placed at the end of the collection. In other respects, I am not afraid of the charge of exhibiting a want of generosity, in publishing, after the fall of Napoleon, attacks directed against his power. She, whose talents were always devoted to the defence of the noblest of causes, she, whose house was successively the asylum of the oppressed of all parties, would have been too far above such a reproach. It could only be addressed, at all events, to the editor of the Ten Years' Exile; but I confess it would but very little affect me. It would certainly be assigning too fine a part to despotism, if, after having imposed the silence of terror during its triumph, it could call upon history to spare it after its destruction. The recollections of the last government have no doubt afforded a pretence for a great deal of persecution; no doubt men of integrity have revolted at the cowardly invectives which are still permitted against those, who having enjoyed the favors of that government, have had sufficient dignity not to disavow their past conduct; Finally, there is no doubt but fallen grandeur captivates the imagination. But it is not merely the personal character of Napoleon that is here in question; it is not he who can now be an object of animadversion to generous minds; no more can it be those who, under his reign, have usefully served their country in the different branches of the public administration; but that which we can never brand with too severe a stigma, is the system of selfishness and oppression of which Bonaparte is the author. But is not this deplorable system still in full sway in Europe? and have not the powerful of the earth carefully gathered up the shameful inheritance of him whom they have overthrown? And if we turn our eyes towards our own country, how many of these instruments of Napoleon do we not see, who, after having fatigued him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of their wisdom are extracted? In painting in stronger colours, therefore, this fatal government, we are not insulting over a fallen enemy, but attacking a still powerful adversary; and if, as I hope, the Ten Years' Exile are destined to increase the horror of arbitrary governments, I may venture to indulge the pleasing idea, that by their publication I shall be rendering a service to the sacred cause to which my mother never ceased to be faithful. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface, by the Editor Part The First Chapter 1. Causes of Bonaparte's animosity against me Chapter 2. Commencement of opposition in the Tribunate.--My first Persecution on that account.--Fouche Chapter 3. System of Fusion adopted by Bonaparte.--Publication of my Work on Literature Chapter 4. Conversation of my Father with Bonaparte.--Campaign of Marengo Chapter 5. The Infernal Machine.--Peace of Luneville Chapter 6. Corps diplomatique during the Consulate.--Death of the Emperor Paul Chapter 7. Paris in 1801 Chapter 8. Journey to Coppet.--Preliminaries of Peace with England Chapter 9. Paris in 1802.--Bonaparte President of the Italian Republic.--My return to Coppet Chapter 10. New symptoms of Bonaparte's ill will to my Father and Myself.--Affairs of Switzerland Chapter 11. Rupture with England.--Commencement of my Exile Chapter 12. Departure for Germany.--Arrival at Weimar Chapter 13. Berlin.--Prince Louis-Ferdinand Chapter 14. Conspiracy of Moreau and Pichegru Chapter 15. Assassination of the Duke d'Enghien Chapter 16. Illness and Death of M. Necker Chapter 17. Trial of Moreau Chapter 18. Commencement of the Empire Part the Second Chapter 1. Suppression of my Work on Germany.--Banishment from France Chapter 2. Return to Coppet--Different Persecutions. Chapter 3. Journey in Switzerland with M. de Montmorency Chapter 4. Exile of M. de Montmorency and Madame Recamier.--New Persecutions Chapter 5. Departure from Coppet Chapter 6. Passage through Austria;--1812 Chapter 7. Residence at Vienna Chapter 8. Departure from Vienna Chapter 9. Passage through Poland Chapter 10. Arrival in Russia Chapter 11. Kiow Chapter 12. Road from Kiow to Moscow Chapter 13. Appearance of the Country--Character of the Russians Chapter 14. Moscow Chapter 15. Road from Moscow to Petersburg Chapter 16. St. Petersburg Chapter 17. The Imperial Family Chapter 18. Manners of the great Russian Nobility Chapter 19. Establishments for Public Education.--Institute of St. Catherine Chapter 20. Departure for Sweden.--Passage through Finland TEN YEARS' EXILE Part The First CHAPTER 1. Causes of Bonaparte's animosity against me. It is not with the view of occupying the public attention with what relates to myself, that I have determined to relate the circumstances of my ten years' exile; the miseries which I have endured, however bitterly I may have felt them, are so trifling in the midst of the public calamities of which we are witnesses, that I should be ashamed to speak of myself if the events which concern me were not in some degree connected with the great cause of threatened humanity. The Emperor Napoleon, whose character exhibits itself entire in every action of his life, has persecuted me with a minute anxiety, with an ever increasing activity, with an inflexible rudeness; and my connections with him contributed to make him known to me, long before Europe had discovered the key of the enigma. I shall not here enter into a detail of the events that preceded the appearance of Bonaparte upon the political stage of Europe; if I accomplish the design I have of writing the life of my father, I will there relate what I have witnessed of the early part of the revolution, whose influence has changed the fate of the whole world. My object at present is only to retrace what relates to myself in this vast picture; in casting from that narrow point of view some general surveys over the whole, I flatter myself with being frequently overlooked, in relating my own history. The greatest grievance which the Emperor Napoleon has against me, is the respect which I have always entertained for real liberty. These sentiments have been in a manner transmitted to me as an inheritance, and adopted as my own, ever since I have been able to reflect on the lofty ideas from which they are derived, and the noble actions which they inspire. The cruel scenes which have dishonored the French revolution, proceeding only from tyranny under popular forms, could not, it appears to me, do any injury to the cause of liberty: at the most, we could only feel discouraged with respect to France; but if that country had the misfortune not to know how to possess that noblest of blessings, it ought not on that account to be proscribed from the face of the earth. When the sun disappears from the horizon of the Northern regions, the inhabitants of those countries do not curse his rays, because they are still shining upon others more favored by heaven. Shortly after the 18th Brumaire, Bonaparte had heard that I had been speaking strongly in my own parties, against that dawning oppression, whose progress I foresaw as clearly as if the future had been revealed to me. Joseph Bonaparte, whose understanding and conversation I liked very much, came to see me, and told me, "My brother complains of you. Why, said he to me yesterday, why does not Madame de Stael attach herself to my government? what is it she wants? the payment of the deposit of her father? I will give orders for it: a residence in Paris? I will allow it her. In short, what is it she wishes?" "Good God!" replied I, "it is not what I wish, but what I think, that is in question." I know not if this answer was reported to him, but if it was, I am certain that he attached no meaning to it; for he believes in the sincerity of no one's opinions; he considers every kind of morality as nothing more than a form, to which no more meaning is attached than to the conclusion of a letter; and as the having assured any one that you are his most humble servant would not entitle him to ask any thing of you, so if any one says that he is a lover of liberty,--that he believes in God,--that he prefers his conscience to his interest, Bonaparte considers such professions only as an adherence to custom, or as the regular means of forwarding ambitious views or selfish calculations. The only class of human beings whom he cannot well comprehend, are those who are sincerely attached to an opinion, whatever be the consequences of it: such persons Bonaparte looks upon as boobies, or as traders who outstand their market, that is to say, who would sell themselves too dear. Thus, as we shall see in the sequel, has he never been deceived in his calculations but by integrity, encountered either in individuals or nations. CHAPTER 2. Commencement of opposition in the Tribunate--My first persecution on that account--Fouche. Some of the tribunes, who attached a real meaning to the constitution, were desirous of establishing in their assembly an opposition analogous to that of England; as if the rights, which that constitution professed to secure, had anything of reality in them, and the pretended division of the bodies of the state were anything more than a mere affair of etiquette, a distinction between the different anti-chambers of the first consul, in which magistrates under different names could hold together, I confess that I saw with pleasure the aversion entertained by a small number of the tribunes, to rival the counsellors of state in servility. I had especially a strong belief that those who had previously allowed themselves to be carried too far in their love for the republic would continue faithful to their opinions, when they became the weakest, and the most threatened. One of these tribunes, a friend of liberty, and endowed with one of the most remarkable understandings ever bestowed upon man, M. Benjamin Constant, consulted me upon a speech which he purposed to deliver, for the purpose of signalizing the dawn of tyranny: I encouraged him in it with all the strength of my conviction. However, as it was well known that he was one of my intimate friends, I could not help dreading what might happen to me in consequence. I was vulnerable in my taste for society. Montaigne said formerly, I am a Frenchman through Paris: and if he thought so three centuries ago, what must it be now, when we see so many persons of extraordinary intellect collected in one city, and so many accustomed to employ that intellect in adding to the pleasures of conversation. The demon of ennui has always pursued me; by the terror with which he inspires me, I could alone have been capable of bending the knee to tyranny, if the example of my father, and his blood which flows in my veins, had not enabled me to triumph over this weakness. Be that as it may, Bonaparte knew this foible of mine perfectly: he discerns quickly the weak side of any one; for it is by their weaknesses that he subjugates people to his sway. To the power with which he threatens, to the treasures with which he dazzles, he joins the dispensation of ennui, and that is a source of real terror to the French. A residence at forty leagues from the capital, contrasted with the advantages collected in the most agreeable city in the world, fails not in the long run to shake the greater part of exiles, habituated from their infancy to the charms of a Parisian life. On the eve of the day when Benjamin Constant was to deliver his speech, I had a party, among whom were Lucien Bonaparte, MM. ------ and several others, whose conversation in different degrees possesses that constant novelty of interest which is produced by the strength of ideas and the grace of expression. Every one of these persons, with the exception of Lucien, tired of being proscribed by the directory, was preparing to serve the new government, requiring only to be well rewarded for their devotion to its power. Benjamin Constant came up and whispered to me, "Your drawing room is now filled with persons with whom you are pleased: if I speak, tomorrow it will be deserted:--think well of it." "We must follow our conviction," said I to him. This reply was dictated by enthusiasm; but, I confess, if I had foreseen what I have suffered since that day, I should not have had the firmness to refuse M. Constant's offer of renouncing his project, in order not to compromise me. At present, so far as opinion is affected, it is nothing to incur the disgrace of Bonaparte: he may make you perish, but he cannot deprive you of respect. Then, on the contrary, France was not enlightened as to his tyrannical views, and as all who had suffered from the revolution expected to obtain from him the return of a brother, or a friend, or the restoration of property, any one who was bold enough to resist him was branded with the name of Jacobin, and you were deprived of good society along with the countenance of the government: an intolerable situation, particularly for a woman, and of which no one can know the misery without having experienced it. On the day when the signal of opposition was exhibited in the tribunate by my friend, I had invited several persons whose society I was fond of, but all of whom were attached to the new government. At five o'clock I had received ten notes of apology; the first and second I bore tolerably well, but as they succeeded each other rapidly, I began to be alarmed. In vain did I appeal to my conscience, which advised me to renounce all the pleasures attached to the favour of Bonaparte: I was blamed by so many honorable people, that I knew not how to support myself on my own way of thinking. Bonaparte had as yet done nothing exactly culpable; many asserted that he preserved France from anarchy: in short, if at that moment he had signified to me any wish of reconciliation, I should have been delighted: but a step of that sort he will never take without exacting a degradation, and, to induce that degradation, he generally enters into such passions of authority, as terrify into yielding every thing. I do not wish by that to say that Bonaparte is not really passionate: what is not calculation in him is hatred, and hatred generally expresses itself in rage: but calculation is in him so much the strongest, that he never goes beyond what it is convenient for him to show, according to circumstances and persons. One day a friend of mine saw him storming at a commissary of war, who had not done his duty; scarcely had the poor man retired, trembling with apprehension, when Bonaparte turned round to one of his aides-du-camp, and said to him, laughing, I hope I have given him a fine fright; and yet the moment before, you would have believed that he was no longer master of himself. When it suited the first consul to exhibit his ill-humour against me, he publicly reproached his brother Joseph for continuing to visit me. Joseph felt it necessary in consequence to absent himself from my house for several weeks, and his example was followed by three fourths of my acquaintance. Those who had been proscribed on the 18th Fructidor, pretended that at that period, I had been guilty of recommending M. de Talleyrand to Barras, for the ministry of foreign affairs: and yet, these people were then continually about that same Talleyrand, whom they accused me of having served. All those who behaved ill to me, were cautious in concealing that they did so for fear of incurring the displeasure of the first consul. Every day, however, they invented some new pretext to injure me, thus exerting all the energy of their political opinions against a defenceless and persecuted woman, and prostrating themselves at the feet of the vilest Jacobins, the moment the first consul had regenerated them by the baptism of his favor. Fouche, the minister of police, sent for me to say, that the first consul suspected me of having excited my friend who had spoken in the tribunate. I replied to him, which was certainly the truth, that M. Constant was a man of too superior an understanding to make his opinions matter of reproach to a woman, and that besides, the speech in question contained absolutely nothing but reflections on the independence which every deliberative assembly ought to possess, and that there was not a word in it which could be construed into a personal reflection on the first consul. The minister admitted as much. I ventured to add some words on the respect due to the liberty of opinions in a legislative body; but I could easily perceive that he took no interest in these general considerations; he already knew perfectly well, that under the authority of the man whom he wished to serve, principles were out of the question, and he shaped his conduct accordingly. But as he is a man of transcendant understanding in matters of revolution, he had already laid it down as a system to do the least evil possible, the necessity of the object admitted. His preceding conduct certainly exhibited little feeling of morality, and he was frequently in the habit of talking of virtue as an old woman's story. A remarkable sagacity, however, always led him to choose the good as a reasonable thing, and his intelligence made him occasionally do what conscience would have dictated to others. He advised me to go into the country, and assured me, that in a few days, all would be quieted. But at my return, I was very far from finding it so. CHAPTER 3 System of Fusion adopted by Bonaparte--Publication of my work on Literature. While we have seen the Christian kings take two confessors to examine their consciences more narrowly, Bonaparte chose two ministers one of the old and the other of the new regime, whose business it was to place at his disposal the Machiavelian means of two opposite systems. In all his nominations, Bonaparte followed nearly the same rule, of taking, as it may be said, now from the right, and now from the left, that is to say, choosing alternately his officers among the aristocrats, and among the jacobins: the middle party, that of the friends of liberty, pleased him less than all the others, composed as it was of the small numbers of persons, who in France, had an opinion of their own. He liked much better to have to do with persons who were attached to royalist interests, or who had become stigmatized by popular excesses. He even went so far as to wish to name as a counsellor of state a conventionalist sullied with the vilest crimes of the days of terror; but he was diverted from it by the shuddering of those who would have had to sit along with him. Bonaparte would have been delighted to have given that shining proof that he could regenerate, as well as confound, every thing. What particularly characterizes the government of Bonaparte, is his profound contempt for the intellectual riches of human nature; virtue, mental dignity, religion, enthusiasm, these, these are in his eyes, the eternal enemies of the continent, to make use of his favorite expression; he would reduce man to force and cunning, and designate every thing else as folly or stupidity. The English particularly irritate him, as they have found the means of being honest, as well as successful, a thing which Bonaparte would have us regard as impossible. This shining point of the world has dazzled his eyes from the very first days of his reign. I do not believe, that when Bonaparte put himself at the head of affairs, he had formed the plan of universal monarchy: but I believe that his system was, what he himself described it a few days after the 18th Brumaire to one of my friends: "Something new must be done every three months, to captivate the imagination of the French Nation; with them, whoever stands still is ruined." He flattered himself with being able to make daily encroachments on the liberty of France, and the independence of Europe: but, without losing sight of the end, he knew how to accommodate himself to circumstances; when the obstacle was too great, he passed by it, and stopped short when the contrary wind blew too strongly. This man, at bottom so impatient, has the faculty of remaining immoveable when necessary; he derives that from the Italians, who know how to restrain themselves in order to attain the object of their passion, as if they were perfectly cool in the choice of that object. It is by the alternate employment of cunning and force, that he has subjugated Europe; but, to be sure, Europe is but a word of great sound. In what did it then consist? In a few ministers, not one of whom had as much understanding as many men taken at hap-hazard from the nation which they governed. Towards the spring of 1800, I published my work on Literature, and the success it met with restored me completely to favor with society; my drawing room became again filled, and I had once more the pleasure of conversing, and conversing in Paris, which, I confess has always been to me the most fascinating of all pleasures. There was not a word about Bonaparte in my book, and the most liberal sentiments were, I believe, forcibly expressed in it. But the press was then far from being enslaved as it is at present; the government exercised a censorship upon newspapers, but not upon books; a distinction which might be supported, if the censorship had been used with moderation: for newspapers exert a popular influence, while books, for the greater part, are only read by well informed people, and may enlighten, but not inflame opinion. At a later period, there were established in the senate, I believe in derision, a committee for the liberty of the press, and another for personal liberty, the members of which are still renewed every three months. Certainly the bishopricks in partibus, and the sinecures in England afford more employment than these committees. Since my work on Literature, I have published Delphine, Corinne, and finally my work on Germany, which was suppressed at the moment it was about to make its appearance. But although this last work has occasioned me the most bitter persecution, literature does not appear to me to be less a source of enjoyment and respect, even for a female. What I have suffered in life, I attribute to the circumstances which associated me, almost at my entry into the world, with the interests of liberty, which were supported by my father and his friends; but the kind of talent which has made me talked of as a writer, has always been to me a source of greater pleasure than pain. The criticisms of which one's works are the objects, can be very easily borne, when one is possessed of some elevation of soul, and when one is more attached to noble ideas for themselves, than for the success which their promulgation can procure us. Besides, the public, at the end of a certain time, appears to me always equitable; self-love must accustom itself to do credit to praise; for in due time, we obtain as much of that as we deserve. Finally, if we should have even to complain long of injustice, I conceive no better asylum against it than philosophical meditation, and the emotion of eloquence. These faculties place at our disposal a whole world of truths and sentiments, in which we can breathe at perfect freedom. CHAPTER 4. Conversation of my father with Bonaparte.--Campaign of Marengo. Bonaparte set out in the spring of 1800, to make the campaign of Italy, which was distinguished by the battle of Marengo. He went by Geneva, and as he expressed a desire to see M. Necker, my father waited upon him, more with the hope of serving me, than from any other motive. Bonaparte received him extremely well, and talked to him of his plans of the moment, with that sort of confidence which is in his character, or rather in his calculation; for it is thus we must always style his character. My father, at first seeing him, experienced nothing of the impression which I did; he felt no restraint in his presence, and found nothing extraordinary in his conversation. I have endeavoured to account to myself for this difference in our opinions of the same person; and, I believe, that it arose, first, because the simple and unaffected dignity of my father's manners ensured him the respect of all who conversed with him; and second, because the kind of superiority attached to Bonaparte proceeding more from ability in evil action, than from the elevation of good thoughts, his conversation cannot make us conceive what distinguishes him; he neither could nor would explain his own Machiavelian instinct. My father uttered not a word to him of his two millions deposited in the public treasury; he did not wish to appear interested but for me, and said to him, among other things, that as the first consul loved to surround himself with illustrious names, he ought to feel equal pleasure in encouraging persons of celebrated talent, as the ornament of his power. Bonaparte replied to him very obligingly, and the result of this conversation ensured me, at least for some time longer, a residence in France. This was the last occasion when my father's protecting hand was extended over my existence; he has not been a witness of the cruel persecution I have since endured, and which would have irritated him even more than myself. Bonaparte repaired to Lausanne to prepare the expedition of Mount St. Bernard; the old Austrian general could not believe in the possibility of so bold an enterprise, and in consequence made inadequate preparations to oppose it. It was said, that a small body of troops would have been sufficient to destroy the whole French army in the midst of the mountainous passes, through which Bonaparte led it; but in this, as well as in several other instances, the following verses of J. B. Rousseau might be very well applied to the triumphs of Bonaparte: L'experience indecile Du compagnon de Paul Emile, Fit tout le succes d'Annibal. (The unruly inexperience of the colleague of Paulus Emilius, was the cause of all the victories of Hannibal). I arrived in Switzerland to pass the summer according to custom with my father, nearly about the time when the French army was crossing the Alps. Large bodies of troops were seen continually passing through these peaceful countries, which the majestic boundary of the Alps ought to shelter from political storms. In these beautiful summer evenings, on the borders of the lake of Geneva, I was almost ashamed, in the presence of that beautiful sky and pure water, of the disquietude I felt respecting the affairs of this world: but it was impossible for me to overcome my internal agitation: I could not help wishing that Bonaparte might be beaten, as that seemed the only means of stopping the progress of his tyranny. I durst not, however, avow this wish, and the prefect of the Leman, M. Eymar (an old deputy to the Constituent Assembly), recollecting the period when we cherished together the hope of liberty, was continually sending me couriers to inform me of the progress of the French in Italy. It would have been difficult for me to make M. Eymar (who was in other respects a most interesting character,) comprehend that the happiness of France required that her army should then meet with reverses, and I received the supposed good news which he sent me, with a degree of restraint which was very little in unison with my character. Was it necessary since that to be continually hearing of the triumphs of him who made his successes fall indiscriminately upon the heads of all? and out of so many victories, has there ever arisen a single gleam of happiness for poor France? The battle of Marengo was lost for a couple of hours: the negligence of General Melas, who trusted too much to the advantages he had gained, and the audacity of General Desaix, restored the victory to the French arms. While the fate of the battle was almost desperate, Bonaparte rode about slowly on horseback, pensive, and looking downward, more courageous against danger than misfortune, attempting nothing, but waiting the turn of the wheel. He has behaved several times in a similar way, and has found his advantage in it. But I cannot help always thinking, that if Bonaparte had fairly encountered among his adversaries a man of character and probity, he would have been stopped short in his career. His great talent lies in terrifying the feeble, and availing himself of unprincipled characters. When he encounters honour any where, it may be said that his artifices are disconcerted, as evil spirits are conjured by the sign of the cross. The armistice which was the result of the battle of Marengo, the conditions of which included the cession of all the strong places in the North of Italy, was most disadvantageous to Austria. Bonaparte could not have gained more by a succession of victories. But it might be said that the continental powers appeared to consider it honorable to give up what would have been worth still more if they had allowed them to be taken. They made haste to sanction the injustice of Napoleon, and to legitimate his conquests, while they ought, if they could not conquer, at least not to have seconded him. This certainly was not asking too much of the old cabinets of Europe; but they knew not how to conduct themselves in so novel a situation, and Bonaparte confounded them so much by the union of promises and threats, that in giving up, they believed they were gaining, and rejoiced at the word peace, as much as if this word had preserved its old signification. The illuminations, the reverences, the dinners, and firing of cannon to celebrate this peace, were exactly the same as formerly: but far from cicatrizing the wounds, it introduced into the government which signed it a most certain and effectual principle of dissolution. The most remarkable circumstance in the fortune of Napoleon is the sovereigns whom he found upon the throne. Paul I. particularly did him incalculable service; he had the same enthusiasm for him that his father had felt for Frederic the Second, and he abandoned Austria at the moment when she was still attempting to struggle. Bonaparte persuaded him that the whole of Europe would be pacified for centuries, if the two great empires of the East and West were agreed; and Paul, who had something chivalrous in his disposition, allowed himself to be entrapped by these fallacies. It was an extraordinary piece of good fortune in Bonaparte to meet with a crowned head so easily duped, and who united violence and weakness in such equal degrees: no one therefore regretted Paul more than he did, for no one was it so important to him to deceive. Lucien, the minister of the interior, who was perfectly acquainted with his brother's schemes, caused a pamphlet to be published, with the view of preparing men's minds for the establishment of a new dynasty. This publication was premature, and had a bad effect; Fouche availed himself of it to ruin Lucien. He persuaded Bonaparte that the secret was revealed too soon, and told the republican party, that Bonaparte disavowed what his brother had done. In consequence Lucien was then sent ambassador to Spain. The system of Bonaparte was to advance gradually in the road to power; he was constantly spreading rumours of the plans he had in agitation, in order to feel the public opinion. Generally even he was anxious to have his projects exaggerated, in order that the thing itself, when it took place, might be a softening of the apprehension which had circulated in public. The vivacity of Lucien on this occasion carried him too far, and Bonaparte judged it advisable to sacrifice him to appearances for some time. CHAPTER 5. The infernal machine.--Peace of Luneville. I returned to Paris in the month of November 1800. Peace was not yet made, although Moreau by his victories had rendered it more and more necessary to the allied powers. Has he not since regretted the laurels of Stockach and Hohenlinden, when France has not been less enslaved than Europe, over which he made her triumph? Moreau recognized only his country in the orders of the first consul; but such a man ought to have formed his opinion of the government which employed him, and to have acted under such circumstances, upon his own view of the real interests of his country. Still, it must be allowed that at the period of the most brilliant victories of Moreau, that is to say, in the autumn of 1800, there were but few persons who had penetrated the secret projects of Bonaparte; what was evident at a distance, was the improvement of the finances, and the restoration of order in several branches of the administration. Napoleon was obliged to begin by the good to arrive at the bad; he was obliged to increase the French army, before he could employ it for the purposes of his personal ambition. One evening when I was conversing with some friends, we heard a very loud explosion, but supposing it to be merely the firing of some cannon by way of exercise, we paid no attention to it, and continued our conversation. We learned a few hours afterwards that in going to the opera, the first consul had narrowly escaped being destroyed by the explosion of what has been called the infernal machine. As he escaped, the most lively interest was expressed towards him: philosophers proposed the re-establishment of fire and the wheel for the punishment of the authors of this outrage; and he could see on all sides a nation presenting its neck to the yoke. He discussed very coolly at his own house the same evening what would have happened if he had perished. Some persons said that Moreau would have replaced him: Bonaparte pretended that it would have been General Bernadotte. "Like Antony," said he, "he would have presented to the inflamed populace the bloody robe of Caesar." I know not if he really believed that France would have then called Bernadotte to the head of affairs, but what I am quite sure of is, that he said so for the purpose of exciting envy against that general. If the infernal machine had been contrived by the jacobins, the first consul might have immediately redoubled his tyranny; public opinion would have seconded him: but as this plot proceeded from the royalist party, he could not derive much advantage from it. He endeavoured rather to stifle, than avail himself of it, as he wished the nation to believe that his enemies were only the enemies of order, and not the friends of another order, that is to say, of the old dynasty. What is very remarkable, is, that on the occasion of a royalist conspiracy, Bonaparte caused, by a senatus consultum, one hundred and thirty jacobins to be transported to the island of Madagascar, or rather to the bottom of the sea, for they have never been heard of since. This list was made in the most arbitrary manner possible; names were put upon it, or erased, according to the recommendations of counsellors of state, who proposed, and of senators, who sanctioned it. Respectable people said, when the manner in which this list had been made was complained of, that it was composed of great criminals; that might be very true, but it is the right and not the fact which constitutes the legality of actions. When the arbitrary transportation of one hundred and thirty citizens is submitted to, there is nothing to prevent, as we have since seen, the application of the same treatment to the most respectable persons.--Public opinion, it is said, will prevent this, Opinion! what is it without the authority of law? what is it without independent organs to express it? Opinion was in favor of the Duke d'Enghien, in favor of Moreau, in favor of Pichegru:--was it able to save them? There will be neither liberty, dignity, nor security in a country where proper names are discussed when injustice is about to be committed. Every man is innocent until condemned by a legal tribunal; and the fate of even the greatest of criminals, if he is withdrawn from the law, ought to make good people tremble in common, with others. But, as is the custom in the English House of Commons, when an opposition member goes out, he requests a ministerial member to pair off with him, not to alter the strength of either party, Bonaparte never struck the jacobins or the royalists without dividing his blows equally between them: he thus made friends of all those whose vengeance he served. We shall see in the sequel that he always reckoned on the gratification of this passion to consolidate his government: for he knows that it is much more to be depended on than affection. After a revolution, the spirit of party is so bitter, that a new chief can subdue it more by serving its vengeance, than by supporting its interests: all abandon, if necessary, those who think like themselves, provided they can sacrifice those who think differently. The peace of Luneville was proclaimed: Austria only lost in this first peace the republic of Venice, which she had formerly received as an indemnity for Belgium; and this ancient mistress of the Adriatic, once so haughty and powerful, again passed from one master to the other. CHAPTER 6. Corps diplomatique during the Consulate.--Death of the Emperor Paul. I passed that winter in Paris very tranquilly. I never went to the first consul's--I never saw M. de Talleyrand. I knew Bonaparte did not like me: but he had not yet reached the degree of tyranny which he has since displayed. Foreigners treated me with distinction,--the corps diplomatique were my constant visitors,--and this European atmosphere served me as a safeguard. A minister just arrived from Prussia fancied that the republic still existed, and began by putting forward some of the philosophical notions he had acquired in his intercourse with Frederick the Great: it was hinted to him that he had quite mistaken his ground, and that he must rather avail himself of his knowledge of courts. He took the hint very quickly, for he is a man whose distinguished powers are in the service of a character particularly supple. He ends the sentence you begin, and begins that which he thinks you will end; and it is only in turning the conversation upon the transactions of former ages, on ancient literature, or upon subjects unconnected with persons or things of the present day, that you discover the superiority of his understanding. The Austrian Ambassador was a courtier of a totally different stamp, but not less desirous of pleasing the higher powers. The one had all the information of a literary character; the other knew nothing of literature beyond the French plays, in which he had acted the parts of Crispin and Chrysalde. It is a known fact, that when ambassador to Catherine II, he once received despatches from his court, when he happened to be dressed as an old woman; and it was with difficulty that the courier could be made to recognize his ambassador in that costume. M. de C. was an extremely common-place character; he said the same things to almost every one he met in a drawing room: he spoke to every person with a kind of cordiality in which sentiments and ideas had no part. His manners were engaging, and his conversation pretty well formed by the world; but to send such a man to negotiate * with the revolutionary strength and roughness that surrounded Bonaparte, was a most pitiable spectacle. An aide-de-camp of Bonaparte complained of the familiarity of M. de C.; he was displeased that one of the first noblemen of the Austrian monarchy should squeeze his hand without ceremony. These new debutans in politeness could not conceive that ease was in good taste. In truth, if they had been at their ease, they would have committed strange inconsistencies, and arrogant stiffness was much better suited to them in the new part they wished to play. Joseph Bonaparte, who negociated the peace of Luneville, invited M. de C. to his charming country seat of Morfontaine, where I happened to meet him. Joseph was extremely fond of rural occupation, and would walk with ease and pleasure in his gardens for eight hours in succession. M. de C. tried to follow him, more out of breath than the Duke of Mayenne, whom Henry IV. amused himself with making walk about, notwithstanding his corpulence. The poor man talked very much of fishing, among the pleasures of the country, because it allowed him to sit down; he absolutely warmed in speaking of the innocent pleasure of catching some little fish with the line. When he was ambassador at Petersburg, Paul I. had treated him with the greatest indignity. He and I were playing at backgammon in the drawing room at Morfontaine, when one of my friends came in and informed us of the sudden death of that Sovereign. M. de C. immediately began making the most official lamentations possible on this event. "Although I had reason to complain of him," said he, "I shall always acknowledge the excellent qualities of this prince, and I cannot help regretting his loss." He thought rightly that the death of Paul was a fortunate event for Austria, and for Europe, but he had in his conversation, a court mourning, that was really quite intolerable. It is to be hoped, that the progress of time will rid the world of the courtier spirit, the most insipid of all others, to say nothing more. Bonaparte was extremely alarmed at the death of Paul, and it is said, that on that occasion he uttered the first--Ah, my God! that was ever heard to proceed from his lips. He had no reason, however, to disturb himself; for the French were then more disposed to endure tyranny than the Russians. I was invited to general Berthier's one day, when the first consul was to be of the party; and as I knew that he expressed himself very unfavourably about me, it struck me that he might perhaps accost me with some of those rude expressions, which he often took pleasure in addressing to females, even to those who paid their court to him; I wrote down therefore as they occured to me, before I went to the entertainment, a variety of tart and piquant replies which I might make to what I supposed he might say to me. I did not wish to be taken by surprise, if he allowed himself to insult me, for that would have been to show a want both of character and understanding; and as no person could promise themselves not to be confused in the presence of such a man, I prepared myself before hand to brave him. Fortunately the precaution was unnecessary; he only addressed the most common questions possible to me; and the same thing happened to all of his opponents, to whom he attributed the possibility of replying to him: at all times, however, he never attacks, but when he feels himself much the strongest. During supper, the first consul stood behind the chair of Madame Bonaparte, and balanced himself sometimes on one leg, and sometimes on the other, in the manner of the princes of the house of Bourbon. I made my neighbour remark this vocation for royalty, already so decided. CHAPTER 7. Paris in 1801 The opposition in the tribunate still continued; that is to say, about twenty members out of a hundred, tried to speak out against the measures of every kind, with which tyranny was preparing. A grand question arose, in the law which gave to the government the fatal power of creating special tribunals to try persons accused of state crimes; as if the handing over a man to these extraordinary tribunals, was not already prejudging the question, that is to say, if he is a criminal, and a criminal of state; and as if, of all crimes, political crimes were not those which required the greatest precaution and independence in the manner of examining them, as the government is in such causes almost always a party interested. We have since seen what are the military commissions to try crimes of state; and the death of the Duke d'Eughien marks to all the horror which that hypocritical power ought to inspire, which covers murder with the mantle of the law. The resistance of the tribunate, feeble as it was, displeased the first consul; not that it was any obstacle to his designs, but it kept up the habit of thinking in the nation, which he wished to stifle entirely. He put into the journals among other things, an absurd argument against the opposition. Nothing is so simple or so proper, was it there said, as an opposition in England, because the king is the enemy of the people; but in a country, where the executive government is itself named by the people, it is opposing the nation to oppose its representative. What a number of phrases of this kind have the scribes of Napoleon deluged the public with for ten years! In England or America the meanest peasant would laugh in your face at a sophism of this nature; in France, all that is desired, is to have a phrase ready, with which to give to one's interest the appearance of conviction. Very few persons showed themselves strangers to the desire of having places; a great number were ruined, and the interest of their wives and children, or of their nephews and nieces, if they had no children, or of their cousins, if they had no nephews, obliged them, they said, to seek employment from the government. The great strength of the heads of the state in France, is the prodigious taste that the people have for places; vanity even makes them more sought for, than the emolument attached to them. Bonaparte received thousands of petitions for every office, from the highest to the lowest. If he had not had naturally a profound contempt for the human race, he would have conceived it in running over petitions, signed by names illustrious from their ancestry, or celebrated by revolutionary actions in complete opposition to the new functions they were ambitious of fulfilling. The winter of 1801 at Paris was made extremely agreeable to me, by the readiness with which Fouche granted the applications I made to him for the return of different emigrants: in this way he left me, in the midst of my disgrace, the pleasure of being useful, and I retain a most grateful recollection to him for it. It must be confessed, that in the actions of women, there is always a little coquetry, and that the greater part of their very virtues are mixed with the desire of pleasing, and of being surrounded by friends, whose attachment to them is heightened by the feeling of obligation. In this point of view only, can our sex be pardoned for being fond of influence: but there are occasions when we ought even to sacrifice the pleasure of obliging to preserve our dignity: for we may do every thing for the sake of others, excepting to degrade our character. Our own conscience is as it were the treasure of the Almighty, which we are not permitted to make use of for the advantage of others. Bonaparte was still at some expense on account of the Institute, upon which he piqued himself so much when he was in Egypt: but there was among the men of letters, and the savants, a petty philosophical opposition, unfortunately of a very bad description, which was entirely directed against the re-establishment of religion. By a fatal caprice, the enlightened spirits in France wished to console themselves for the slavery of this world, by endeavouring to destroy the hopes of a better: this singular inconsistency would not have happened under the protestant religion; but the catholic clergy had enemies, whom their courage and misfortunes had not yet disarmed; and perhaps, it is really difficult to make the authority of the pope, and of priests subject to the pope, harmonize with the independence of a state. Be that as it may, the Institute exhibited for religion, independant of its ministers, none of that profound respect, inseparable from a lofty combination of mind and genius; and Bonaparte was left to support, against men of more value than himself, opinions which were of more value than them. In this year (1801), the first consul ordered the king of Spain to make war upon Portugal, and the feeble monarch of that illustrious nation condemned his army to this expedition, equally servile and unjust, against a neighbour, who had no hostile intentions, and whose only offence was his alliance with that England, which has since shewn itself so true a friend to Spain: and all this in obedience to the man who was preparing to deprive him of his very existence. When we have seen these same Spaniards giving with so much energy the signal of the resurrection of the world, we learn to know what nations are, and what are the consequences of refusing them a legal means of expressing their opinion, and regulating their own destiny. Towards the spring of 1801, the first consul took it into his head to make a king, and a king of the house of Bourbon: he bestowed Tuscany upon him, designating it by the classical name of Etruria, for the purpose of commencing the grand masquerade of Europe. This infanta of Spain was ordered to Paris for the purpose of exhibiting to the French the spectacle of a prince of the ancient dynasty humbled before the first consul; more humbled by his gifts than he ever could have been by his persecution. Bonaparte tried upon this royal lamb the experiment of making a king wait in his antechamber: he allowed himself to be applauded at the theatre, upon the recitation of this verse: "J'ai fait des rois, madame, et n'ai pas voulu l'etre:" (I have made kings, madam, and have not wished to be one:) promising himself to be more than a king, when the opportunity should offer. Every day some fresh blunder of this poor king of Etruria was the subject of conversation: he was taken to the Museum, to the Cabinet of Natural History, and some of his questions about quadrupeds and fishes, which a well educated child of twelve years old would have been ashamed to put, were quoted as proofs of intelligence. In the evening, he was conducted to entertainments, where the female opera dancers came and mixed with the ladies of the new court; the little monarch, in spite of his devotion, preferred dancing with them, and in return sent them next day presents of elegant and good books for their instruction. This period of transition from revolutionary habits to monarchical pretensions in France, was a most singular one; as there was as little independence in the one, as dignity in the other, their absurdities harmonised perfectly together; each of them in their own way formed a group round the parti-coloured potentate, who at the same time employed the forcible means of both regimes. For the last time, the 14th of July, the anniversary of the revolution, was celebrated this year, and a pompous proclamation was put forth to remind the people of the advantages resulting from that day, not one of which advantages the first consul had not made up his mind to destroy. Of all the collections that were ever made, that of the proclamations of this man is the most singular: it is a complete encyclopedia of contradictions; and if chaos itself were employed to instruct the earth, it would doubtless, in a similar way, throw at the heads of mankind, eulogiums of peace and war, of knowledge and prejudices, of liberty and despotism, praises and insults upon all governments and all religions. It was at this period that Bonaparte sent General Leclerc to Saint Domingo, and designated him in his decree our brother-in-law. This first royal we, which associated the French with the prosperity of this family, was a most bitter pill to me. He obliged his beautiful sister to accompany her husband to Saint Domingo, where her health was completely ruined: a singular act of despotism for a man who is not accustomed to great severity of principles in those about his person; but he makes use of morality only to harass some and dazzle others. A peace was in the sequel concluded with the chief of the negroes, Toussaint-Louverture. This man was, no doubt, a great criminal, but Bonaparte had signed conditions with him, in complete violation of which Toussaint was conducted to a prison in France, where he ended his days in the most miserable manner. Perhaps Bonaparte himself hardly recollects this crime, because he has been less reproached with it than others. In a great forge, we see with astonishment the violence of the machines which are set in motion by a single will: these hammers, those flatteners seem so many persons, or rather devouring animals. Should you attempt to resist their force, they would annihilate you; notwithstanding, all this apparent fury is calculated beforehand, and a single mover gives action to these springs. The tyranny of Bonaparte is represented to my eyes by this image; he makes thousands of men perish, as these wheels beat the iron, and his agents are the greater part of them equally insensible; the invisible impulse of these human machines proceeds from a will at once violent and methodical, which transforms moral life into its servile instrument. Finally, to complete the comparison, it is sufficient to seize the mover to restore every thing to a state of repose. CHAPTER 8. Journey to Coppet.--Preliminaries of peace with England. I went, according to my usual happy custom, to spend the summer with my father. I found him extremely indignant at the state of affairs; and as he had all his life been as much attached to real liberty as he detested popular anarchy, he felt inclined to draw his pen against the tyranny of one, after having so long fought against that of the many. My father was fond of glory, and however prudent his character, hazards of every kind did not displease him, when the public esteem was to be deserved by incurring them, I was quite sensible of the danger to which any work of his which should displease the first consul, would expose myself; but I could not resolve to stifle this song of the swan, who wished to make himself heard once more on the tomb of French liberty. I encouraged him therefore in his design, but we deferred to the following year the question whether what he wrote should be published. The news of the signature of the preliminaries of peace between England and France, came to put the crown to Bonaparte's good fortune. When I learned that England had recognised his power, it seemed to me that I had been wrong in hating it; but circumstances were not long in relieving me from this scruple. The most remarkable article of these preliminaries was the complete evacuation of Egypt: that expedition therefore had had no other result than to make Bonaparte talked of. Several publications written in places beyond the reach of Bonaparte's power, accuse him of having made Kleber be assassinated in Egypt, because he was jealous of his influence; and I have been assured by persons worthy of credit, that the duel in which General D'Estaing was killed by General Regnier was provoked by a discussion on this point. It appears to me, however, scarcely credible that Bonaparte should have had the means of arming a Turk against the life of a French general, at a moment when he was far removed from the theatre of the crime. Nothing ought to be said against him of which there are not proofs; the discovery of a single error of this kind among the most notorious truths would tarnish their lustre. We must not fight Bonaparte with any of his own weapons. I delayed my return to Paris to avoid being present at the great fete in honour of the peace. I know no sensation more painful than these public rejoicings in which the heart refuses to participate. We feel a sort of contempt for this booby people which comes to celebrate the yoke preparing for it: these dull victims dancing before the palace of their sacrificer: this first consul designated the father of the nation which he was about to devour: this mixture of stupidity on one side, and cunning on the other: the stale hypocrisy of the courtiers throwing a veil over the arrogance of the master: all inspired me with an insurmountable disgust. It was necessary however to constrain one's feelings, and during these solemnities you were exposed to meet with official congratulations, which at other times it was more easy to avoid. Bonaparte then proclaimed that peace was the first want of the world: every day he signed some new treaty, therein resembling the care with which Polyphemus counted the sheep as he drove them into his den. The United States of America also made peace with France, and sent as their plenipotentiary, a man who did not know a word of French, apparently ignorant that the most complete acquaintance with the language was barely sufficient to penetrate the truth, in a government which knew so well how to conceal it. The first consul, on the presentation of Mr. Livingston, complimented him, through an interpreter, on the purity of manners in America, and added "the old world is very corrupt;" then turning round to M. de ----, he repeated twice, "explain to him that the old world is very corrupt: you know something of it, don't you?" This was one of the most agreeable speeches he ever addressed in public to this courtier, who was possessed of better taste than his fellows, and wished to preserve some dignity in his manners, although he sacrificed that of the mind to his ambition. Meantime, however, monarchical institutions were rapidly advancing under the shadow of the republic. A pretorian guard was organized: the crown diamonds were made use of to ornament the sword of the first consul, and there was observable in his dress, as well as in the political situation of the day, a mixture of the old and new regime: he had his dresses covered with gold, and his hair cropped, a little body, and a large head, an indescribable air of awkwardness and arrogance, of disdain and embarrassment, which altogether formed a combination of the bad graces of a parvenu, with all the audacity of a tyrant. His smile has been cried up as agreeable; my own opinion is, that in any other person it would have been found unpleasant; for this smile, breaking out from a confirmed serious mood, rather resembled an involuntary twitch than a natural movement, and the expression of his eyes was never in unison with that of his mouth; but as his smile had the effect of encouraging those who were about him, the relief which it gave them made it be taken for a charm. I recollect once being told very gravely by a member of the Institute, a counsellor of state, that Bonaparte's nails were perfectly well made. Another time a courtier exclaimed, "The first consul's hand is beautiful!" "Ah! for heaven's sake, Sir," replied a young nobleman of the ancient noblesse, who was not then a chamberlain, "don't let us talk politics." The same courtier, speaking affectionately of the first consul, said, "He frequently displays the most infantine sweetness." Certainly, in his own family, he amused himself sometimes with innocent games; he has been seen to dance with his generals; it is even said that at Munich, in the palace of the king and queen of Bavaria, to whom no doubt this gaiety appeared very odd, he assumed one evening the Spanish costume of the Emperor Charles VII. and began dancing an old French country dance, la Monaco. CHAPTER 9. Paris in 1802.--Bonaparte President of the Italian republic.--My return to Coppet. Every step of the first consul announced more and more openly his boundless ambition. While the peace with England was negotiating at Amiens, he assembled at Lyons the Cisalpine Consulta, consisting of the deputies from Lombardy and the adjacent states, which had been formed into a republic under the directory, and who now inquired what new form of government they were to assume. As people were not yet accustomed to the idea of the unity of the French republic being transformed into the unity of one man, no one ever dreamt of the same person uniting on his own head the first consulship of France and the presidency of Italy; it was expected therefore that Count Melzi would be nominated to the office, as the person most distinguished by his knowledge, his illustrious birth, and the respect of his fellow citizens. All of a sudden the report got abroad that Bonaparte was to get himself nominated; and at this news a moment of life seemed still perceptible in the public feeling. It was said that the French constitution deprived of the right of citizenship whoever accepted employment in a foreign country; but was he a Frenchman, who only wanted to make use of the great nation for the oppression of Europe, and vice versa? Bonaparte juggled the nomination of president out of all these Italians, who only learned a few hours before proceeding to the scrutiny, that they must appoint him. They were told to join the name of Count Melzi, as vice-president, to that of Bonaparte. They were assured that they would only be governed by the former, who would always reside among them, and that the latter was merely ambitious of an honorary title. Bonaparte said to them himself in his usual emphatic manner, "Cisalpines, I shall preserve only the great idea of your interests." But the great idea meant the complete power. The day after this election, they were seriously occupied in making a constitution, as if any one could exist by the side of this iron hand. The nation was divided into three classes; the possidenti, the dotti, and the commerrianti. The landholders, to be taxed; the literary men, to be silenced; and the merchants, to have all the ports shut against them. These sounding words in Italian are even better adapted to the purposes of quackery than the corresponding French. Bonaparte had changed the name of Cisalpine republic into that of Italian republic, thereby giving Europe an anticipation of his future conquests in the rest of Italy. Such a step was every thing but pacific, and yet it did not prevent the signature of the treaty of Amiens; so much did Europe, and even England itself, then desire peace! I was at the English ambassador's at the moment of his receiving the terms of this treaty. He read them aloud to the persons who were dining with him, and it is impossible for me to express the astonishment I felt at every article. England restored all her conquests; she restored Malta, of which it had been said, when it was taken by the French, that if there had been nobody in the fortress, they would never have been able to enter it. In short, she gave up every thing, and without compensation, to a power which she had constantly beaten at sea. What an extraordinary effect of the passion for peace! And yet this man, who had so miraculously obtained such advantages, had not the patience to make use of them for a few years, to put the French navy in a state to meet that of England. Scarcely had the treaty of Amiens been signed, when Napoleon, by a senatus-consultum, annexed Piedmont to France. During the twelve months the peace lasted, everyday was marked by some new proclamation, provoking to a breach of the treaty. The motives of this conduct it is easy to penetrate; Bonaparte wished to dazzle the French nation, now by unexpected treaties of peace, at other times by wars which would make him necessary to it. He believed that a period of disturbance was favourable to usurpation. The newspapers, which were instructed to boast of the advantages of peace in the spring of 1802, said then "We are approaching the moment when systems of politics will become of no effect." If Bonaparte had really wished it, he might at that period have easily bestowed twenty years of peace upon Europe, in the state of terror and ruin to which it was reduced. The friends of liberty in the tribunate were still endeavouring to struggle against the constantly increasing power of the first consul; but they had not then the advantage of being seconded by public opinion. The greater number of the opposition tribunes were every way deserving of esteem: but there were three or four persons who acted along with them, who had been guilty of revolutionary excesses, and the government took especial care to throw upon all, the blame which could only attach to a few. It is certain, however, that men collected in a public assembly generally end in electrifying themselves with the sparks of mental dignity; and this tribunate, even such as it was, would, had it been allowed to continue, have prevented the establishment of tyranny. Already the majority of votes had nominated, as a candidate for the senate, Daunou, an honest and enlightened republican, but certainly not a man to be dreaded. This was sufficient, however, to determine the first consul to the elimination of the tribunate; which means to make twenty of the most energetic members of the assembly retire one by one, on the designation of the senators, and to have them replaced by twenty others, devoted to the government. The eighty who remained, were each year to undergo the same operation by fourths. A lesson was in this manner given them of what they were expected to do, to retain their places, or in other words, their salary of fifteen thousand francs; the first consul wishing to preserve some time longer this mutilated assembly, which might serve for two or three years more as a popular mask to his tyrannical acts. Among the proscribed tribunes were several of my friends; but my opinion was in this instance altogether independent of my attachments. Perhaps, however, I might feel a greater degree of irritation at the injustice which fell upon persons with whom I was connected, and I have no doubt that I allowed myself the expression of some sarcastic remarks on this hypocritical method of interpreting the unfortunate constitution, into which they had endeavoured to prevent the entrance of the smallest spark of liberty. There was at that time formed round general Bernadotte, a party of generals and senators, who wished to have his opinion, if some means could not be devised to stop the progress of the usurpation, which was now rapidly approaching. He proposed a variety of plans, all founded upon some legislative measure or other, considering any other means as contrary to his principles. But to obtain any such measure, it required a deliberation of at least some members of the senate, and not one of them was found bold enough to subscribe such an instrument. While this most perilous negociation continued, I was in the habit of seeing general Bernadotte and his friends very frequently; this was more than enough to ruin me, if their designs were discovered. Bonaparte remarked that people always came away from my house less attached to him than when they entered it; in short he determined to single me out as the only culprit, among many, who were much more so than I was, but whom it was of more consequence to him to spare. Just at this time I set out for Coppet, and reached my father's house in a most painful state of anxiety and mental oppression. My letters from Paris informed me, that after my departure, the first consul had expressed himself very warmly on the subject of my connections with general Bernadotte. There was every appearance of his being resolved to punish me; but he paused at the idea of sacrificing general Bernadotte; either because his military talents were necessary to him; restrained by the family ties which connected them; afraid of the greater popularity of Bernadotte with the French army; or finally because there is a certain charm in his manners, which renders it difficult even to Bonaparte to become entirely his enemy. What provoked the first consul still more than the opinions which he attributed to me, was the number of strangers who came to visit me. The Prince of Orange, son of the Stadtholder, did me the honour to dine with me, for which he was reproached by Bonaparte. The existence of a woman, who was visited on account of her literary reputation, was but a trifle; but that trifle was totally independant of him, and was sufficient to make him resolve to crush me. In this year, 1802, the affair of the princes, who had possessions in Germany was settled. The whole of that negociation was conducted at Paris, to the great profit, it was said, of the ministers who were employed in it. Be that as it may, it was at this period that began the diplomatic spoliation of Europe, which was only stopped at its very extremities. All the great noblemen of feudal Germany, were seen at Paris exhibiting their ceremonial, whose obsequious formalities were much more agreeable to the first consul than the still easy manner of the French; and asking back what belonged to them with a servility which would almost make one lose the right to one's own property, so much had it the air of regarding the authority of justice as nothing. A nation singularly proud, the English, was not at this time altogether exempt from a degree of curiosity about the person of the first consul, approaching to homage. The ministerial party regarded him in his proper light; but the opposition, which ought to have a greater hatred of tyranny, as it is supposed to be more enthusiastic for liberty, the opposition party, and Fox himself, whose talents and goodness of heart one cannot recollect without admiration, and the tenderest emotion, committed the error of shewing too much attention to Bonaparte, thereby serving to prolong the mistake of those, who wished still to confound with the French revolution, the most decided enemy of the first principles of that revolution. CHAPTER 10. New symptoms of Bonaparte's ill will to my father and myself. --Affairs of Switzerland. At the beginning of the winter 1802-3, when I saw by the papers that so many illustrious Englishmen, and so many of the most intelligent persons in France were collected in Paris, I felt, I confess, the strongest desire to be among them. I do not dissemble, that a residence in Paris has always appeared to me the most agreeable of all others; I was born there--there I have passed my infancy and early youth--and there only could I meet the generation which had known my father, and the friends who had with us passed through the horrors of the revolution. This love of country, which has attached the most strongly constituted minds, lays still stronger hold of us, when it unites the enjoyments of intellect with the affections of the heart, and the habits of imagination. French conversation exists nowhere but in Paris, and conversation has been since my infancy, my greatest pleasure. I experienced such grief at the apprehension of being deprived of this residence, that my reason could not support itself against it. I was then in the full vivacity of life, and it is precisely the want of animated enjoyment, which leads most frequently to despair, as it renders that resignation very difficult, without which we cannot support the vicissitudes of life. The prefect of Geneva had received no orders to refuse me my passports for Paris, but I knew that the first consul had said in the midst of his circle, that I would do well not to return; and he was already in the habit, on subjects of this nature, of dictating his pleasure in conversation, in order to prevent his being called upon, by the anticipation of his orders. If he had in this manner said, that such and such an individual ought to go and hang himself, I believe that he would have been displeased, if the submissive subject had not in obedience to the hint, bought a rope and prepared the gallows. Another proof of his ill will to me, was the manner in which the French journals criticized my romance of Delphine, which appeared at this time; they thought proper to denounce it as immoral, and the work which had received my father's approbation was condemned by these courtier criticks. There might be found in that book, that fire of youth, and ardour after happiness, which ten years, and those years of suffering, have taught me to direct in another manner. But my censors were not capable of feeling this sort of error, and merely acted in obedience to that voice which ordered them to pull to pieces the work of the father, prior to attacking that of the daughter. In fact we heard from all quarters, that the true reason of the first consul's anger, was this last work of my father, in which the whole scaffolding of his monarchy was delineated by anticipation. My father, and also my mother, during her life-time, had both the same predilection for a Paris residence that I had. I was extremely sorrowful at being separated from my friends, and at being unable to give my children that taste for the fine arts, which is acquired with difficulty in the country; and as there was no positive prohibition of my return in the letter of the consul Lebrun,* but merely some significant hints, I formed a hundred projects of returning, and trying if the first consul, who at that time was still tender of public opinion, would venture to brave the murmurs which my banishment would not fail to excite. My father, who condescended sometimes to reproach himself for being partly the cause of spoiling my fortune, conceived the idea of going himself to Paris, to speak to the first consul in my favor. I confess, that at first I consented to accept this proof of my father's attachment; I represented to myself such an idea of the ascendancy which his presence would produce, that I thought it impossible to resist him; his age, the fine expression of his looks, and the union of so much noble mindedness, and refinement of intellect, appeared to me likely even to captivate Bonaparte himself. I knew not at that time, to what a degree the consul was irritated against his book; but fortunately for me, I reflected that these very advantages were only more likely to excite in the first consul a stronger desire of humbling their possessor. Assuredly he would have found means, at least in appearance, of accomplishing that desire; as power in France has many allies, and if the spirit of opposition has been frequently displayed, it has only been because the weakness of the government has offered it an easy victory. It cannot be too often repeated, that what the French love above all things, is success, and that with them, power easily succeeds in making misfortune ridiculous. Finally, thank God! I awoke from the illusion to which I had given myself up, and positively refused the noble sacrifice which my father proposed to make for me. When he saw me completely decided not to accept it, I perceived how much it would have cost him. I lost him fifteen months afterwards, and if he had then executed the journey he proposed, I should have attributed his illness to that cause, and remorse would have still kept my wound festering. * This letter is the same which is spoken of in the 4th part of the Considerations on the French revolution, chap. 7. Editor. It was also during the winter of 1802-3, that Switzerland took arms against the unitarian constitution which had been imposed upon her. Singular mania of the French revolutionists to compel all countries to adopt a political organization similar to that of France! There are, doubtless, principles common to all countries, such as those which secure the civil and political rights of free people; but of what consequence is it whether there should be a limited monarchy, as in England, or a federal republic, like the United States, or the Thirteen Swiss Cantons? and was it necessary to reduce Europe to a single idea, like the Roman people to a single head, in order to be able to command and to change the whole in one day! The first consul certainly attached no importance to this or that form of constitution, or even to any constitution whatever; but what was of consequence to him, was to make the best use he could of Switzerland for his own interest, and with that view, he conducted himself prudently. He combined the various plans which were offered to him, and drew up a form of constitution which conciliated sufficiently well the ancient habits with the modern pretensions, and in causing himself to be named Mediator of the Swiss Confederation, he drew more persons from that country, than he could have driven from it, if he had governed it directly. He made the deputies nominated by the cantons and principal cities of Switzerland come to Paris; and on the 9th of January 1803, he had a conference of seven hours with ten delegates, chosen from the general deputation. He dwelt upon the necessity of re-establishing the democratic cantons in their former state, pronouncing on this occasion some declamations on the cruelty of depriving shepherds dispersed among the mountains, of their sole amusement, namely, popular assemblies; stating also, (what concerned him more nearly,) the reasons he had for mistrusting the aristocratic cantons. He insisted strongly on the importance of Switzerland to France. These were his words, as they are given in a narrative of this conference: "I can declare that since I have been at the head of this government, no power has taken the least interest in Switzerland: 'twas I who made the Helvetic republic be acknowledged at Luneville: Austria cared not the least for it. At Amiens I wished to do the same, and England refused it: but England has nothing to do with Switzerland. If she had expressed the least apprehension that I wished to be declared your Landamann, I would have been so. It has been said that England encouraged the last insurrection; if the English cabinet had taken a single official step, or if there had been a syllable said about it in the London Gazette, I would have immediately united you with France." What incredible language! Thus, the existence of a people who had secured their independence in the midst of Europe by the most heroic efforts, and maintained it for five centuries by wisdom and moderation, this existence would have been annihilated by a movement of spleen which the least accident might have excited in a being so capricious. Bonaparte added in this same conference, that it was unpleasant to him to have a constitution to make, because it exposed him to be hissed, which he had no partiality for. This expression (etre siffle) bears the stamp of the deceitfully affable vulgarity in which he frequently took pleasure in indulging. Roederer and Desmeunier wrote the act of mediation from his dictation, and the whole passed during the time that his troops occupied Switzerland. He has since withdrawn them, and this country, it must be confessed, has been better treated by Napoleon than the rest of Europe, although both in a political and military point of view more completely dependent upon him; consequently it will remain tranquil in the general insurrection. The people of Europe were disposed to such a degree of patience that it has required a Bonaparte to exhaust it. The London newspapers attacked the first consul bitterly enough; the English nation was too enlightened not to perceive the drift of his actions. Whenever any translations from the English papers were brought to him, he used to apostrophize Lord Whitworth, who answered him with equal coolness and propriety that the King of Great Britain himself was not protected from the sarcasms of newswriters, and that the constitution permitted no violation of their liberty on that score. However, the English government caused M. Peltier to be prosecuted for some articles in his journal directed against the first consul. Peltier had the honour to be defended by Mr. Mackintosh, who made upon this occasion one of the most eloquent speeches that has been read in modern times; I will mention farther on, under what circumstances this speech came into my hands. CHAPTER 11. Rupture with England.--Commencement of my Exile. I was at Geneva, living from taste and from circumstances in the society of the English, when the news of the declaration of war reached us. The rumour immediately spread that the English travellers would all be made prisoners: as nothing similar had ever been heard of in the law of European nations, I gave no credit to it, and my security was nearly proving injurious to my friends: they contrived however, to save themselves. But persons entirely unconnected with political affairs, among whom was Lord Beverley, the father of eleven children, returning from Italy with his wife and daughters, and a hundred other persons provided with French passports, some of them repairing to different universities for education, others to the South for the recovery of their health, all travelling under the safeguard of laws recognised by all nations, were arrested, and have been languishing for ten years in country towns, leading the most miserable life that the imagination can conceive. This scandalous act was productive of no advantage; scarcely two thousand English, including very few military, became the victims of this caprice of the tyrant, making a few poor individuals suffer, to gratify his spleen against the invincible nation to which they belong. During the summer of 1803 began the great farce of the invasion of England; flat-bottomed boats were ordered to be built from one end of France to the other; they were even constructed in the forests on the borders of the great roads. The French, who have in all things a very strong rage for imitation, cut out deal upon deal, and heaped phrase upon phrase: while in Picardy some erected a triumphal arch, on which was inscribed, "the road to London," others wrote, "To Bonaparte the Great. We request you will admit us on board the vessel which will bear you to England, and with you the destiny and the vengeance of the French people." This vessel, on board of which Bonaparte was to embark, has had time to wear herself out in harbour. Others put, as a device for their flags in the roadstead, "a good wind, and thirty hours". In short, all France resounded with gasconades, of which Bonaparte alone knew perfectly the secret. Towards the autumn I believed myself forgotten by Bonaparte: I heard from Paris that he was completely absorbed in his English expedition, that he was preparing to set out for the coast, and to embark himself to direct the descent. I put no faith in this project; but I flattered myself that he would be satisfied if I lived at a few leagues distance from Paris, with the small number of friends who would come that distance to visit a person in disgrace. I thought also that being sufficiently well known to make my banishment talked of all over Europe, the first consul would wish to avoid this eclat. I had calculated according to my own wishes; but I was not yet thoroughly acquainted with the character of the man who was to domineer over Europe. Far from wishing to keep upon terms with persons who had distinguished themselves, in whatever line that was, he wished to make all such merely a pedestal for his own statue, either by treading them underfoot, or by making them subservient to his designs. I arrived at a little country seat, I had at ten leagues from Paris, with the project of establishing myself during the winter in this retreat, as long as the system of tyranny lasted. I only wished to see my friends there, and to go occasionally to the theatre, and to the museum. This was all the residence I wished in Paris, in the state of distrust and espionnage which had begun to be established, and I confess I cannot see what inconsistency there would have been in the first consul allowing me to remain in this state of voluntary exile. I had been there peaceably for a month, when a female, of that description which is so numerous, endeavouring to make herself of consequence at the expense of another female, more distinguished than herself, went and told the first consul that the roads were covered with people going to visit me. Nothing certainly could be more false. The exiles whom the world went to see, were those who in the eighteenth century were almost as powerful as the monarchs who banished them; but when power is resisted, it is because it is not tyrannical; for it can only be so by the general submission. Be that as it may, Bonaparte immediately seized the pretext, or the motive that was given him to banish me, and I was apprized by one of my friends, that a gendarme would be with me in a few days with an order for me to depart. One has no idea, in countries where routine at least secures individuals from any act of injustice, of the terror which the sudden news of arbitrary acts of this nature inspires. It is besides extremely easy to shake me; my imagination more readily lays hold of trouble than hope, and although I have often found my chagrin dissipated by the occurrence of novel circumstances, it always appears to me, when it does come, that nothing can deliver me from it. In fact it is very easy to be unhappy, especially when we aspire to the privileged lots of existence. I withdrew immediately on receiving the above intimation to the house of a most excellent and intelligent lady*, to whom I ought to acknowledge I was recommended by a person who held an important office in the government*; I shall never forget the courage with which he offered me an asylum himself: but he would have the same good intentions at present, when he could not act in that manner without completely endangering his existence. In proportion as tyranny is allowed to advance, it grows, as we look at it, like a phantom, but it seizes with the strength of a real being. I arrived then, at the country seat of a person whom I scarcely knew, in the midst of a society to which I was an entire stranger, and bearing in my heart the most cutting chagrin, which I made every effort to disguise. During the night, when alone with a female who had been for several years devoted to my service, I sat listening at the window, in expectation of hearing every moment the steps of a horse gendarme; during the day I endeavoured to make myself agreeable, in order to conceal my situation. I wrote a letter from this place to Joseph Bonaparte, in which I described with perfect truth the extent of my unhappiness. A retreat at ten leagues distance from Paris, was the sole object of my ambition, and I felt despairingly, that if I was once banished, it would be for a great length of time, perhaps for ever. Joseph and his brother Lucien generously used all their efforts to save me, and they were not the only ones, as will presently be seen. * Madame de Latour. * Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. Madame Recamier, so celebrated for her beauty, and whose character is even expressed in her beauty, proposed to me to come and live at her country seat at St. Brice, at two leagues from Paris. I accepted her offer, for I had no idea that I could thereby injure a person so much a stranger to political affairs; I believed her protected against every thing, notwithstanding the generosity of her character. I found collected there a most delightful society, and there I enjoyed for the last time, all that I was about to quit. It was during this stormy period of my existence, that I received the speech of Mr. Mackintosh; there I read those pages, where he gives us the portrait of a jacobin, who had made himself an object of terror during the revolution to children, women and old men, and who is now bending himself double under the rod of the Corsican, who ravishes from him, even to the last atom of that liberty, for which he pretended to have taken arms. This morceau of the finest eloquence touched me to my very soul; it is the privilege of superior writers sometimes, unwittingly, to solace the unfortunate in all countries, and at all times. France was in a state of such complete silence around me, that this voice which suddenly responded to my soul, seemed to me to come down from heaven; it came from a land of liberty. After having passed a few days with Madame Recamier, without hearing my banishment at all spoken of, I persuaded myself that Bonaparte had renounced it. Nothing is more common than to tranquillize ourselves against a threatened danger, when we see no symptoms of it around us. I felt so little disposition to enter into any hostile plan or action against this man, that I thought it impossible for him not to leave me in peace; and after some days longer, I returned to my own country seat, satisfied that he had adjourned his resolution against me, and was contented with having frightened me. In truth I had been sufficiently so, not to make me change my opinion, or oblige me to deny it, but to repress completely that remnant of republican habit which had led me the year before, to speak with too much openness. I was at table with three of my friends, in a room which commanded a view of the high road, and the entrance gate; it was now the end of September. At four o'clock, a man in a brown coat, on horseback, stops at the gate and rings: I was then certain of my fate. He asked for me, and I went to receive him in the garden. In walking towards him, the perfume of the flowers, and the beauty of the sun particularly struck me. How different are the sensations which affect us from the combinations of society, from those of nature! This man informed me, that he was the commandant of the gendarmerie of Versailles; but that his orders were to go out of uniform, that he might not alarm me; he shewed me a letter signed by Bonaparte, which contained the order to banish me to forty leagues distance from Paris, with an injunction to make me depart within four and twenty hours; at the same time, to treat me with all the respect due to a lady of distinction. He pretended to consider me as a foreigner, and as such, subject to the police: this respect for individual liberty did not last long, as very soon afterwards, other Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were banished without any form of trial. I told the gendarme officer, that to depart within twenty four hours, might be convenient to conscripts, but not to a woman and children, and in consequence, I proposed to him to accompany me to Paris, where I had occasion to pass three days to make the necessary arrangements for my journey. I got into my carriage with my children and this officer, who had been selected for this occasion, as the most literary of the gendarmes. In truth, he began complimenting me upon my writings. "You see," said I to him, "the consequences of being a woman of intellect, and I would recommend you, if there is occasion, to dissuade any females of your family from attempting it." I endeavoured to keep up my spirits by boldness, but I felt the barb in my heart. I stopt for a few minutes at Madame Recamier's; I found there General Junot, who from regard to her, promised to go next morning to speak to the first consul in my behalf; and he certainly did so with the greatest warmth. One would have thought, that a man so useful from his military ardor to the power of Bonaparte, would have had influence enough with him, to make him spare a female; but the generals of Bonaparte, even when obtaining numberless favours for themselves, have no influence with him. When they ask for money or places, Bonaparte finds that in character; they are in a manner then in his power, as they place themselves in his dependance; but if, what rarely happens to them, they should think of defending an unfortunate person, or opposing an act of injustice, he would make them feel very quickly, that they are only arms employed to support slavery, by submitting to it themselves. I got to Paris to a house I had recently hired, but not yet inhabited; I had selected it with care in the quarter and exposition which pleased me; and had already in imagination set myself down in the drawing room with some friends, whose conversation is in my opinion, the greatest pleasure the human mind can enjoy. Now, I only entered this house, with the certainty of quitting it, and I passed whole nights in traversing the apartments, in which I regretted the deprivation of still more happiness than I could have hoped for in it. My gendarme returned every morning, like the man in Blue-beard, to press me to set out on the following day, and every day I was weak enough to ask for one more day. My friends came to dine with me, and sometimes we were gay, as if to drain the cup of sorrow, in exhibiting ourselves in the most amiable light to each other, at the moment of separating perhaps for ever. They told me that this man, who came every day to summon me to depart, reminded them of those times of terror, when the gendarmes came to summon their victims to the scaffold. Some persons may perhaps be surprized at my comparing exile to death; but there have been great men, both in ancient and modern times, who have sunk under this punishment. We meet with more persons brave against the scaffold, than against the loss of country. In all codes of law, perpetual banishment is regarded as one of the severest punishments; and the caprice of one man inflicts in France, as an amusement, what conscientious judges only condemn criminals to with regret. Private circumstances offered me an asylum, and resources of fortune, in Switzerland, the country of my parents; in those respects, I was less to be pitied than many others, and yet I have suffered cruelly. I consider it, therefore, to be doing a service to the world, to signalize the reasons, why no sovereign should ever be allowed to possess the arbitrary power of banishment. No deputy, no writer, will ever express his thoughts freely, if he can be banished when his frankness has displeased; no man will dare to speak with sincerity, if the happiness of his whole family is to suffer for it. Women particularly, who are destined to be the support and reward of enthusiasm, will endeavour to stifle generous feelings in themselves, if they find that the result of their expression will be, either to have themselves torn from the objects of their affection, or their own existence sacrificed, by accompanying them in their exile. On the eve of the last day which was granted me, Joseph Bonaparte made one more effort in my favour; and his wife, who is a lady of the most perfect sweetness and simplicity, had the kindness to come and propose to me to pass a few days at her country seat at Morfontaine. I accepted her invitation most gratefully, for I could not but feel sensibly affected at the goodness of Joseph, who received me in his own house, at the very time that I was the object of his brother's persecution. I passed three days there, and notwithstanding the perfect politeness of the master and mistress of the house, felt my situation very painfully. I saw only men connected with the government and breathed only the air of that authority which had declared itself my enemy; and yet the simplest rules of politeness and gratitude forbid me from shewing what I felt. I had only my eldest son with me, who was then too young for me to converse with him on such subjects. I passed whole hours in examining the gardens of Morfontaine, among the finest that could be seen in France, and the possessor of which, then tranquil, appeared to me really an object of envy. He has been since exiled upon thrones, where I am sure he has often regretted his beautiful retreat. CHAPTER 12. Departure for Germany.--Arrival at Weimar. I hesitated about the course I was to adopt on quitting France. Should I return to my father, or should I go into Germany? My father would have welcomed his poor bird, ruffled by the storm, with ineffable goodness; but I dreaded the disgust of returning, sent back in this manner, to a country, which I was accused of finding rather monotonous. I was also desirous of exhibiting myself, by the kind reception which I had been promised in Germany, superior to the outrage I had received from the first consul; and of placing in public contrast the kind reception of the ancient dynasties, with the rude impertinence of that which was preparing to subjugate France. This movement of self-love triumphed, for my misfortune; I should have again seen my father, if I had returned to Geneva. I requested Joseph to ascertain if I might go into Prussia, for it was necessary for me to be at least certain, that the French ambassador would not reclaim me abroad as a Frenchwoman, while in France I was proscribed as a foreigner. Joseph went in consequence to St. Cloud. I was obliged to wait his answer at a public-house, at two leagues from Paris, not daring to return to my own house in the city. A whole day passed before this answer reached me. Not wishing to attract notice by remaining longer at the house where I was, I made a tour of the walls of Paris in search of another, at the same distance of two leagues, but on a different road. This wandering life, at a few steps from my friends and my own residence, occasioned me such painful sensations as I cannot recollect without shuddering. The room is still present to me; the window where I passed the whole day, looking out for the messenger, a thousand painful details, which misfortune always draws after it, the extreme generosity of some friends, the veiled calculations of others, altogether put my mind in such a cruel state of agitation, as I could not wish to my greatest enemy. At last this message, on which I still placed some hopes, arrived. Joseph sent me some excellent letters of recommendation for Berlin, and bid me adieu in a most noble and touching manner. I was obliged, therefore, to depart. Benjamin Constant was good enough to accompany me; but as he also was very fond of Paris, I felt extremely for the sacrifice he made me. Every step the horses advanced made me ill, and when the postillions boasted of having driven me quickly, I could not help sighing at the disagreeable service they were rendering me. In this way I travelled forty leagues without being able to regain my self-possession. At last we stopped at Chalons, and Benjamin Constant, rallying his spirits, relieved by his wonderful powers of conversation, at least for some moments, the weight which oppressed me. Next day we continued our route as far as Metz, where I wished to stop to wait for news from my father. There I passed fifteen days, and met one of the most amiable and intelligent men whom France and Germany combined could produce, M. Charles Villers. I was delighted with his society, but it renewed my regret for that first of pleasures, a conversation, in which there reigns the most perfect harmony in all that is felt, with all that is expressed. My father was extremely indignant at the treatment I had received at Paris; he considered that his family were in this manner proscribed, and driven as criminals out of that country which he had so faithfully served. He recommended me to pass the winter in Germany, and not to return to him until the spring. Alas! alas! I calculated on then carrying back to him the harvest of new ideas which I was going to collect in this journey. For several years preceding he was frequently telling me that my letters and conversation were all that kept up his connection with the world. His mind had so much vivacity and penetration, that one was excited to think by the pleasure of talking to him. I made observations to report to him,--I listened, to repeat to him. Ever since I have lost him, I see and feel only half what I did, when I had the object in view of giving him pleasure by the picture of my impressions. At Frankfort, my daughter, then five years old, fell dangerously ill. I knew nobody in that city, and was entirely ignorant of the language; even the physician to whose care I entrusted my child scarcely spoke a word of French. Oh! how much my father shared with me in all my trouble! what letters he wrote me! what a number of consultations of physicians, all copied with his own hand, he sent me from Geneva! Never were the harmony of sensibility and reason carried further; never was there any one like him, possessed of such lively emotion for the sufferings of his friends, always active in assisting them, always prudent in the choice of the means of being so; in short, admirable in every thing. My heart absolutely requires this declaration, for what is now to him even the voice of posterity! I arrived at Weimar, where I resumed my courage, on seeing, through the difficulties of the language, the immense intellectual riches which existed out of France. I learned to read German; I listened attentively to Goethe and Wieland, who, fortunately for me, spoke French extremely well. I comprehended the mind and genius of Schiller, in spite of the difficulty he felt in expressing himself in a foreign language. The society of the duke and duchess of Weimar pleased me exceedingly, and I passed three months there, during which the study of German literature gave all the occupation to my mind which it requires to prevent me from being devoured by my own feelings. CHAPTER 13. Berlin.--Prince Louis-Ferdinand. I left Weimar for Berlin, and there I saw that charming queen, since destined to so many misfortunes. The king received me with great kindness, and I may say that during the six weeks I remained in that city, I never heard an individual who did not speak in praise of the justice of his government. This, however does not prevent me from thinking it always desirable for a country to possess constitutional forms, to guarantee to it, by the permanent co-operation of the nation, the advantages it derives from the virtues of a good king. Prussia, under the reign of its present monarch, no doubt possessed the greater part of these advantages; but the public spirit which misfortune has developed in it did not then exist; the military regime had prevented public opinion from acquiring strength, and the absence of a constitution, in which every individual could make himself known by his merit, had left the state unprovided with men of talent, capable of defending it. The favor of a king, being necessarily arbitrary, cannot be sufficient to excite emulation; circumstances which are peculiar to the interior of courts, may keep a man of great merit from the helm of affairs, or place there a very ordinary person. Routine, likewise, is singularly powerful in countries where the regal power has no one to contradict it; even the justice of a king leads him to place barriers around him, by keeping every one in his place; and it was almost without example in Prussia, to find a man deprived of his civil or military employments on account of incapacity. What an advantage therefore ought not the French army to have, composed almost entirely of men born of the revolution, like the soldiers of Cadmus from the teeth of the dragon! What an advantage it had over those old commanders of the Prussian fortified places and armies, to whom every thing that was new was entirely unknown! A conscientious monarch who has not the happiness, and I use the word designedly, the happiness to have a parliament as in England, makes a habit of every thing, in order to avoid making too much use of his own will: and in the present times we must abandon ancient usages, and look for strength of character and understanding, wherever they can be found. Be that as it may, Berlin was one of the happiest and most enlightened cities in the world. The writers of the eighteenth century were certainly productive of infinite good to Europe, by the spirit of moderation, and the taste for literature, with which their works inspired the greater part of the sovereigns: it must be admitted, however, that the respect which the friends of knowledge paid to French intellect has been one of the causes which has ruined Germany for such a length of time. Many people regarded the French armies as the propagators of the ideas of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire; while the fact was, that, if any traces of the opinions of these great men remained in the instruments of the power of Bonaparte, it was only to liberate them from what they called prejudices, and not to establish a single regenerating principle. But there were at Berlin and in the North of Germany, at the period of the spring of 1804, a great many old partizans of the French revolution, who had not yet discovered that Bonaparte was a much more bitter enemy of the first principles of that revolution, than the ancient European aristocracy. I had the honor to form an acquaintance with Prince Louis-Ferdinand, the same whose warlike ardor so transported him, that his death was almost the precursor of the first reverses of his country. He was a man full of ardor and enthusiasm, but who, for want of glory, cultivated too much the emotions which agitate life. What particularly irritated him against Bonaparte was his practice of calumniating all the persons he dreaded, and even of degrading in public opinion those whom he employed, in order, at all risks, to keep them more strongly dependant on him. Prince Louis said to me frequently, "I will allow him to kill, but, moral assassination is what revolts me." And in truth let us only consider the state in which we have seen ourselves placed, since this great libeller became master of all the newspapers of the European continent, and could, as he has frequently done, pronounce the bravest men to be cowards, and the most irreproachable women to be subjects of contempt, without our having any means of contradicting or punishing such assertions. CHAPTER 14. Conspiracy of Moreau and Pichegru. The news had just arrived at Berlin of the great conspiracy of Moreau, of Pichegru, and of George Cadoudal. There was certainly among the principal heads of the republican and royalist parties a strong desire to overturn the authority of the first consul, and to oppose themselves to the still more tyrannical authority which he resolved to establish on making himself be declared emperor: but it has been said, and perhaps not without foundation, that this conspiracy, which has so well served Bonaparte's tyranny, was encouraged by himself, from his wish to take advantage of it, with a Machiavelian art, of which it is of consequence to observe all the springs. He sent an exiled jacobin into England, who could only obtain his return to France by services to be performed for the first consul. This man presented himself, like Sinon in the city of Troy describing himself as persecuted by the Greeks. He saw several emigrants who had neither the vices nor the faculties necessary to detect a certain kind of villainy. He found it therefore a matter of great ease to entrap an old bishop, an old officer, in short some of the wrecks of a government, under which it was scarcely known what factions were. In the sequel he wrote a pamphlet in which he mystified, with a great deal of wit, all who had believed him, and who in truth ought to have made up what they wanted in sagacity by firmness of principle, that is to say, never to place the least confidence in a man capable of bad actions. We have all our own way at looking at things; but from the moment that a person has shewn himself to be treacherous or cruel, God alone can pardon, for it belongs to him only to read the human heart sufficiently to know if it is changed; man ought to keep himself for ever at a distance from the person who has lost his esteem. This disguised agent of Bonaparte pretended that the elements of revolt existed in France to a great extent; he went to Munich to find an English envoy, Mr. Drake, whom he also contrived to deceive. A citizen of Great Britain ought to have kept clear of this web of artifice, composed of the crossed threads of jacobinism and tyranny. George and Pichegru, who were entirely devoted to the Bourbon party, came into France secretly, and concerted with Moreau, whose wish was to rid France of the first consul, but not to deprive the French nation of its right to choose that form of government by which it desired to be ruled. Pichegru wished to have a conversation with General Bernadotte, who refused it, being dissatisfied with the manner in which the enterprise was conducted, and desiring first of all, to have a guarantee for the constitutional freedom of France. Moreau, whose moral character is most excellent, whose military talent is unquestionable, and whose understanding is just and enlightened, allowed himself in conversation, to go to great lengths in blaming the first consul, before he could be at all certain of overthrowing him. It is a defect very natural to a generous mind to express its opinion, even inconsiderately; but General Moreau attracted too much the notice of Bonaparte, not to make such conduct the cause of his destruction. A pretext was wanting to justify the arrest of a man who had gained so many battles, and this pretext was found in his conversation, if it could not be in his actions. Republican forms were still in existence; people called each other citizen, whilst the most terrible inequality, that which liberates some from the yoke of the law, while others are under the dominion of despotism, reigned over all France. The days of the week were still reckoned according to the republican calendar; boasts were made of being at peace with the whole of continental Europe; reports were, (as they still continue to be,) continually presenting upon the making of roads and canals, the building of bridges and fountains; the benefits of the government were extolled to the skies; in short, there was not the least apparent reason for endeavouring to change a state of things, with which the nation was said to be so perfectly satisfied. A plot therefore, in which the English, and the Bourbons should be named, was a most desirable event to the government, in order to stir up once more the revolutionary elements of the nation, and to turn those elements to the establishment of an ultra-monarchical power, under the pretence of preventing the return of the ancient regime. The secret of this combination, which appears very complicated, is in fact very simple: it was necessary to alarm the revolutionists as to the danger to which their interests would be exposed, and to propose to complete their security, by a final abandonment of their principles; and so it was done. Pichegru was become a decided royalist, as he had formerly been a republican; his opinion had been completely turned; his character was superior to his understanding; but the one was as little calculated as the other to draw men after him. George had more elasticity about him, but he was not fitted either by nature or education for the rank of chief. As soon as it was known that these two were at Paris, Moreau was immediately arrested, the barriers were shut, death was denounced to any one who should give an asylum to Pichegru or George, and all the measures of jacobinism were put in force to protect the life of one man. This man is not only of too much importance in his own eyes to stick at any thing, when his own interests are in question, but it likewise entered into his calculations to alarm men's minds, to recall the days of terror, in short to inspire the nation, if possible, with the desire of throwing itself entirely upon him, in order to escape the troubles which it was the tendency of all his measures to increase. The retreat of Pichegru was discovered, and George was arrested in a cabriolet; for, being unable to live longer in any house, he in this manner traversed the streets night and day, to keep himself out of sight of his pursuers. The police agent who seized him, was recompensed with the legion of honour. I imagine that French soldiers would have wished him any reward but that. The Moniteur was filled with addresses to the first consul, congratulating him on his escape from this danger; this incessant repetition of the same phrases, bursting from every corner of France, offers such a concord in slavery as is perhaps unexampled in the history of any other people. You may in turning over the Moniteur, find, according to the different epochs, exercises upon liberty, upon despotism, upon philosophy, and upon religion, in which the departments and good cities of France strive to say the same thing in different terms; and one feels astonished that men so intelligent as the French, should attach themselves entirely to success in the style, and never once have had the desire of exhibiting ideas of their own; one might say that the emulation of words was all that they required. These hymns of dictation, however, with the points of admiration which accompany them, announced that France was completely tranquil, and that the small number of the emissaries of perfidious Albion were seized. One general, it is true, amused himself with reporting, that the English had thrown bales of Levant cotton on the coast of Normandy, to give France the plague; but these inventions of grave buffoonery were only regarded as pieces of flattery addressed to the first consul; and the chiefs of the conspiracy, as well as their agents, being in the power of the government, there was reason for believing that calm was restored in France; but Bonaparte had not yet attained his object. CHAPTER 15. Assassination of the Duke d'Enghien. I resided at Berlin on the Spree Quay, and my apartment was on the ground floor. One morning I was awoke at eight o'clock, and told that Prince Louis-Ferdinand was on horseback under my windows, and wished me to come and speak to him. Much astonished at this early visit, I hastened to get up and go to him. He was a singularly graceful horseman, and his emotion heightened the nobleness of his countenance. "Do you know," said he to me, "that the Duke d'Enghien has been carried off from the Baden territory, delivered to a military commission, and shot within twenty four hours after his arrival in Paris?" "What nonsense!" I answered, "don't you see that this can only be a report spread by the enemies of France?" In fact I confess that my hatred of Bonaparte, strong as it was, never went the length of making me believe in the possibility of his committing such an atrocity. "As you doubt what I tell you," replied Prince Louis, "I will send you the Moniteur, in which you will read the sentence." He left me at these words, and the expression of his countenance was the presage of revenge or death. A quarter of an hour afterwards, I had in my hands this Moniteur of the 21st March, (30th Pluviose), which contained the sentence of death pronounced by the military commission sitting at Vincennes, against the person called Louis d'Enghien! It is thus that the French designated the descendant of heroes, who were the glory of their country. Even if they abjured all the prejudices of illustrious birth, which the return of monarchical forms would necessarily recall, could they blaspheme in thus manner the recollection of the battles of Lens and Rocroi? This Bonaparte who has gained so many battles, does not even know how to respect them; with him there is neither past nor future; his imperious and contemptuous soul will recognize nothing for opinion to hold sacred; he admits only respect for the force which is in existence. Prince Louis wrote to me, beginning his note in these words, "The person called Louis of Prussia begs to know of Madame de Stael, &c." He felt the insult offered to the royal blood from which he sprung, to the recollection of the heroes, in the roll of whom he burned to place his name. How was it possible, after this horrible action, for a single monarch in Europe to connect himself with such a man? Necessity, will it be said? There is a sanctuary in the soul to which his empire never ought to penetrate; if there were not, what would virtue be upon this earth? a mere liberal amusement which could only suit the peaceful leisure of private individuals. A lady of my acquaintance related to me, that a few days after the death of the Duke d'Enghien, she went to take a walk round the castle of Vincennes; the ground, still fresh, marked the spot where he had been buried; some children were playing with little quoits upon this mound of turf, the only monument for the ashes of such a man. An old invalid, with silvered locks, was sitting at a little distance, and remained some time looking at these children; at last he arose, and leading them away by the hand, said to them, shedding some tears, "Do not play there, my children, I beseech you." These tears were all the honors that were paid to the descendant of the great Conde, and the earth did not long bear the impression of them. For a moment at least, public opinion seemed to awaken in France, and indignation, was general. But when these generous flames were extinguished, despotism was but the more easily established, from the vain efforts which had been made to resist it. The first consul was for some days rather uneasy at the disposition of men's minds. Fouche himself blamed this action; he made use of this expression, so characteristic of the present regime: "It is worse than a crime; it is a fault." There are many ideas in this short phrase; but fortunately we may reverse it with truth, by affirming that the greatest of faults is crime. Bonaparte asked an honest senator, what was thought of the death of the Duke d'Enghien. "General," replied he, "it has given great affliction." "I am not astonished at it," said Bonaparte, "a house which has long reigned in a country always interests:" thus wishing to connect with motives of party interest the most natural feeling that the human heart can experience. Another time he put the same question to a tribune, who, from the desire of pleasing him, answered: "Well, general, if our enemies take measures against us, we are in the right to do the same against them;" not perceiving that this was tantamount to a confession that the deed was atrocious. The first consul affected to consider this act as dictated by reasons of state. One day, about this period, in a discussion with an intelligent man about the plays of Corneille, he said, "You see that the public safety, or to express it better, that state necessity, has with the moderns been substituted in the place of the fatality of the ancients: there is, for instance, such a man, who naturally would be incapable of a crime, but political circumstances impose it upon him as a law. Corneille is the only one who has shewn, in his tragedies, an acquaintance with state necessity; on that account, if he had lived in my time, I would have made him my prime minister." All this appearance of good humour in the discussion was intended to prove that there was nothing of passion in the death of the Duke d'Enghien, and that circumstances, meaning such as the head of the state is exclusively the judge of, might cause and justify every thing. That there was nothing of passion in his resolution about the Duke d'Enghien, is perfectly true; people would have it that rage inspired the crime,--it had nothing to do with it. By what could this rage have been provoked? The Duke d'Enghien had in no way provoked the first consul: Bonaparte hoped at first to have got hold of the Duke de Berry, who it was said, was to have landed in Normandy, if Pichegru had given him notice that it was a proper time. This prince is nearer the throne than the Duke d'Enghien, and besides, he would by coming into France have infringed the existing laws. It therefore suited Bonaparte in every way better to have sacrificed him than the Duke d'Enghien; but as he could not get at the first, he chose the second, in discussing the matter in cold blood. Between the order for carrying him off, and that for his execution, more than eight days had elapsed, and Bonaparte ordered the punishment of the Duke d'Enghien long beforehand, as coolly, as he has since sacrificed millions of men to the caprices of his ambition. We now ask, what were the motives of this horrible action, and I believe it is very easy to penetrate them. First, Bonaparte wished to secure the revolutionary party, by contracting with it an alliance of blood. An old jacobin, when he heard the news, exclaimed, "So much the better! General Bonaparte is now become one of the convention." For a long time the jacobins would only have a man who had voted for the death of the king, for the first magistrate of the republic; that was what they termed, giving pledges to the revolution. Bonaparte fulfilled this condition of crime, substituted for that of property required in other countries; he thus afforded the certainty that he would never serve the Bourbons; and thus such of that party as attached themselves to his, burnt their vessels, never to return. On the eve of causing himself to be crowned by the same men who had proscribed royalty, and of re-establishing a noblesse composed of the partisans of equality, he believed it necessary to satisfy them by the horrible guarantee of the assassination of a Bourbon. In the conspiracy of Pichegru and Moreau, Bonaparte knew that the republicans and royalists had united against him; this strange coalition, of which the hatred he inspired was the sole bond, had astonished him. Several persons who held places under him, were marked out for the service of that revolution which was to break his power, and it was of consequence to him that henceforward all his agents should consider themselves ruined beyond redemption, if their master was overturned; and, finally, above all, he wished at the moment of his seizing the crown to inspire such terror, that no one in future should think of resisting him. Every thing was violated in this single action: the European law of nations, the constitution such as it then existed, public shame, humanity, and religion. Nothing could go beyond it; every thing was therefore to be dreaded from the man who had committed it. It was thought for some time in France, that the murder of the Duke d'Enghien was the signal of a new system of revolution, and that the scaffolds were about to be re-erected. But Bonaparte only wished to teach the French one thing, and that was, that he dared do every thing; in order that they might give him credit for the evil he abstained from, as others get it for the good they do. His clemency was praised when he allowed a man to live; it had been seen how easy it was for him to cause one to perish. Russia, Sweden, and above all England, complained of this violation of the Germanic empire; the German princes themselves were silent, and the weak sovereign on whose territory the outrage had been committed, requested in a diplomatic note, that nothing more should be said of the event that had happened. Did not this gentle and veiled expression, applied to such an act, characterize the meanness of those princes, who made their sovereignty consist only in their revenues, and treated a state as a capital, of which they must get the interest paid as quietly as they could? CHAPTER 16. Illness and death of M. Necker. My father lived long enough to hear of the assassination of the Duke d'Enghien, and the last lines which I received, that were traced by his own hand, expressed his indignation at this atrocity. In the midst of the most complete security, I found one day upon my table two letters, announcing to me that my father was dangerously ill. The courier who brought them was concealed from me, as well as the news of his death. I set out immediately with the strongest hope, which I preserved in spite of all the circumstances which ought to have extinguished it. When the real truth became known to me at Weimar, I was seized with a mingled sensation of inexpressible terror and despair. I saw myself without support in the world, and compelled to rely entirely on myself for sustaining my soul against misfortune. Many objects of attachment still remained to me, but the sentiment of affectionate admiration which I felt for my father, exercised a sway over me with which no other could come in competition. Grief, which is the truest of prophets, predicted to me that I should never more be happy at heart, as I had been, whilst this man of all-powerful sensibility watched over my fate; and not a single day has elapsed since the month of April 1804, in which I have not connected all my troubles with his loss. So long as my father lived, I suffered only from imagination; for in the affairs of real life, he always found means to be of service to me; after I lost him, I came in direct communication with destiny. It is nevertheless still to the hope that he is praying for me in heaven, that I am indebted for the fortitude I retain. It is not merely the affection of a daughter, but the most intimate knowledge of his character which makes me affirm that I have never seen human nature carried nearer to perfection than it was in his soul; if I was not convinced of the truth of a future state, I should become mad with the idea that such a being could have ceased to exist. There was so much of immortality in his thoughts and feelings, that it happens to me a hundred times, whenever I feel emotions that elevate me above myself, I believe I still hear him. During my melancholy journey from Weimar to Coppet, I could not help envying the existence of every object that circulated in nature, even the birds and insects which were flying round me; I asked only a day, a single day, to talk to him once more, to excite his compassion; I envied those forest trees whose existence is prolonged for centuries; but the inexorable silence of the grave has something in it which confounds the human intellect; and although it is the truth of all others the best known to us, the strength of the impression it leaves can never be effaced. As I approached my father's residence, one of my friends pointed out to me on the mountain some clouds which bore the resemblance of an immense human figure, which would disappear towards the evening: it seemed to me that the heavens thus offered me the symbol of the loss I had just sustained. He was a man truly great: a man, who in no circumstances of his life ever preferred the most important of his interests to the least of his duties;--a man, whose virtues were inspired to that degree by his goodness, that he could have dispensed with principles, and whose principles were so strict that he might have dispensed with goodness. On my arrival at Coppet, I learned that my father, during the illness of nine days which had deprived me of him, had been continually and anxiously occupying himself about my fate. He reproached himself for his last book, as the cause of my exile; and with a trembling hand, he wrote, during his fever, a letter to the first consul, in which he assured him that I had nothing whatever to do with the publication of his last work, but that on the contrary, I had desired that it should not be printed. This voice of a dying man had so much solemnity! this last prayer of a man who had played so important a part in France, asking as an only favor, the return of his children to the place of their birth, and an act of oblivion to the imprudences which a daughter, then young, might have committed,--all this appeared to me irresistible: and well as I ought to have known the character of the man, that happened to me, which I believe is in the nature of all who ardently desire the cessation of a great affliction:--I hoped contrary to all expectation. The first consul received this letter, and doubtless must have thought me an extreme simpleton to flatter myself for a moment that he would be in the least moved by it. Certainly, I am in that point quite of his opinion. CHAPTER 17. Trial of Moreau. The trial of Moreau still proceeded, and although the journals preserved the most profound silence on the subject, the publicity of the pleadings was sufficient to rouse the minds, and never did the public opinion in Paris show itself so strongly against Bonaparte as it did at that period. The French have more need than any other people of a certain degree of liberty of the press; they require to think and to feel in common; the electricity of the emotions of their neighbours is necessary to make them experience the shock in their turn, and their enthusiasm never displays itself in an isolated manner. Whoever wishes to become their tyrant therefore does well to allow no kind of manifestation to public opinion; Bonaparte joins to this idea, which is common to all despots, an artifice peculiar to the present time, to wit, the art of proclaiming some factitious opinion in journals which have the appearance of being free, they make so many phrases in the sense which they are ordered. It must be confessed that our French writers are the only ones who can in this manner every morning embellish the same sophism, and who hug themselves in the very superfluity of servitude. While the instruction of this famous affair was in progress, the journals informed Europe that Pichegru had strangled himself in the Temple; all the gazettes were filled with a surgical report, which appeared very improbable, notwithstanding the care with which it was drawn up. If it is true that Pichegru had perished the victim of assassination, let us figure to ourselves the situation of a brave general, surprised by cowards in the bottom of his dungeon,--defenceless,--condemned for several days to that prison solitude which sinks the courage of the soul,--ignorant even if his friends will ever know in what manner he perished,--if his death will be revenged,--if his memory will not be outraged! Pichegru had, in his first interrogatory, exhibited a great deal of courage, and threatened, it was said, to exhibit proofs of the promises which Bonaparte had made to the Vendeans of effecting the return of the Bourbons. Some persons pretend that he had been subjected to the torture, as well as two other conspirators, (one of whom, named Picot, shewed his mutilated hands at the tribunal), and that they dared not expose to the eyes of the French people one of its old defenders subjected to the torture of slaves. I give no credit to this conjecture; we must always, in the actions of Bonaparte, look for the calculation which has dictated them, and we shall find none in this latter supposition: while it is, perhaps, true, that the appearance of Moreau and Pichegru together at the bar of a tribunal would have inflamed public opinion to its highest pitch. Already the crowd in the tribunes was immense; several officers, at the head of whom was a loyal man, General Lecourbe, exhibited the most lively and courageous interest for General Moreau. When he repaired to the tribunal, the gendarmes who guarded him always respectfully presented arms to him. Already it had begun to be felt that honor was on the side of the persecuted; but Bonaparte, by his all at once making himself be declared emperor, in the midst of this fermentation, entirely diverted mens' minds by this new perspective, and concealed his progress better in the midst of the storm by which he was surrounded, than he could have done in the calm. General Moreau pronounced before the tribunal one of the best speeches which history presents to us; he recalled, with perfect modesty, the battles which he had gained since Bonaparte governed France; he excused himself for having frequently expressed himself, perhaps with too much freedom, and contrasted in an indirect manner the character of a Breton with that of a Corsican; in short, he exhibited at Once a great deal of mind, and the most perfect presence of mind, at a moment so critical. Regnier at that time united the ministry of police with that of justice, in the room of Fouchc, who had been disgraced. He repaired to Saint Cloud on leaving the tribunal. The emperor asked him what sort of speech Moreau had made: "Contemptible," said he. "In that case," said the emperor, "let it be printed, and distributed all over Paris." When Bonaparte found afterwards how much his minister had been mistaken, he returned at last to Fouche, the only man who could really second him, from his carrying, unfortunately for the world, a sort of skilful moderation into a system that had no limits. An old jacobin, one of Bonaparte's condemned spirits, was employed to speak to the judges, to induce them to condemn Moreau to death. "That is necessary" said he to them, "to the consideration due to the emperor, who caused him to be arrested; but you ought to make the less scruple in consenting to it, as the emperor is resolved to pardon him." "And who will enable us to pardon ourselves, if we cover ourselves with such infamy?" replied one of the judges,* whose name I am not at liberty to mention, for fear of exposing him. General Moreau was condemned to two years' imprisonment; George and several others of his friends to death; one of the MM. de Polignac to two, and the other to four years' imprisonment: and both of them are still confined, as well as several others, of whom the police laid hold, when the period of their sentence had expired. Moreau requested to have his imprisonment commuted for perpetual banishment; perpetual in this instance should be called for life, for the misery of the world is placed on the head of one man. Bonaparte readily consented to this banishment, which suited his views in all respects. Frequently, on Moreau's passage to the place where he was to embark, the mayors of the towns, whose business it was to viser his passport of banishment, shewed him the most respectful attention. "Gentlemen," said one of them to his audience, "make way for General Moreau," and he made an obeisance to him as he would have done to the emperor. There was still a France in the hearts of men, but the idea of acting according to one's opinion had already ceased to exist, and at present it is difficult to know if there remains any, it has been so long stifled. When he arrived at Cadiz, these same Spaniards, who were a few years after destined to give so great an example, paid every possible homage to a victim of tyranny. When Moreau passed through the English fleet, their vessels saluted him as if he had been the commander of an allied army. Thus the supposed enemies of France took upon them to acquit her debt to one of her most illustrious defenders. When Bonaparte caused Moreau to be arrested, he said, "I might have made him come to me, and have told him: 'Listen, you and I cannot remain upon the same soil; go therefore, as I am the strongest;' and I believe he would have gone. But these chivalrous manners are puerile in public matters." Bonaparte believes, and has had the art to persuade several of the Machiavelian apprentices of the new generation, that every generous feeling is mere childishness. It is high time to teach him that virtue also has something manly in it, and more manly than crime with all its audacity. * M. Clavier. CHAPTER 18. Commencement of the Empire. The motion to call Bonaparte to the Empire was made in the tribunate by a conventionalist, formerly a jacobin, supported by Jaubert, an advocate, and deputy from the merchants of Bourdeaux, and seconded by Simeon, a man of understanding and good sense, who had been proscribed as a royalist under the republic. It was Bonaparte's wish that the partisans of the old regime, and those of the permanent interests of the nation, should unite in choosing him. It was settled that registers should be opened all over France, to enable every one to express his wish regarding the elevation of Bonaparte to the throne. But without waiting for the result of this, prepared as it was before-hand, he took the title of emperor by a senatus consultum, and this unfortunate senate had not even the strength to put constitutional limits to this new monarchy. A tribune, whose name I wish I dared mention,* had the honor to make a special motion for that purpose. Bonaparte, in order to anticipate this idea, adroitly sent for some of the senators, and told them, "I feel very much at thus being placed in front; I like my present situation much better. The continuation of the republic is, however, no longer possible; people are quite tired out with it: I believe that the French wish for royalty. I had at first thought of recalling the old Bourbons, but that would have only ruined them, and myself. It is my thorough conviction, that there must be at last a man at the head of all this; perhaps, however, it would be better to wait some time longer I have made France a century older in the last five years; liberty, that is a good civil code, and modern nations care little for any thing but property. However, if you will believe me, name a committee, organise the constitution, and, I tell you fairly." added he smiling, "take precautions against my tyranny; take them, believe me." This apparent good nature seduced the senators, who, to say the truth, desired nothing better than to be seduced. One of them, a men of letters, of some distinction, but one of those philosophers who are always finding philanthropic motives for being satisfied with power, said to one of my friends, "It is wonderful! with what simplicity the emperor allows himself to be told every thing! The other day, I made him a discourse an hour long, to prove the absolute necessity of founding the new dynasty on a charter which should secure the rights of the nation." And what reply did he make you? was asked. "He clapped me on the shoulder with the most perfect good humour, and told me: 'You are quite right, my dear senator; but trust me, this is not the moment for it'." And this senator, like many others, was quite satisfied with having spoken, though his opinion was not in the least degree acted upon. The feelings of self-importance have a prodigiously greater influence over the French than those of character. * M. Gallois. A very odd peculiarity in the French, and which Bonaparte has penetrated with great sagacity, is, that they, who are so ready to perceive what is ridiculous in others, desire nothing better than to render themselves ridiculous, as soon as their vanity finds its account in it in some other way. Nothing certainly presents a greater subject for pleasantry, than the creation of an entirely new noblesse, such as Bonaparte established for the support of his new throne. The princesses and queens, citizenesses of the day before, could not themselves refrain from laughing at hearing themselves styled, your majesty. Others, more serious, delighted in having their title of monseigneur repeated from morning to night, like Moliere's City Gentleman. The old archives were rummaged for the discovery of the best documents on etiquette; men of merit found a grave occupation in making coats of armour for the new families; finally, no day passed which did not afford some scene worthy of the pen of Moliere; but the terror, which formed the back ground of the picture, prevented the grotesque of the front from being laughed at as it deserved to be. The glory of the French generals illustrated all, and the obsequious courtiers contrived to slide themselves in under the shadow of military men, who doubtless deserved the severe honors of a free state, but not the vain decorations of such a court. Valor and genius descend from heaven, and whoever is gifted with them has no need of other ancestors. The distinctions which are accorded in republics or limited monarchies ought to be the reward of services rendered to the country, and every one may equally pretend to them; but nothing savours so much of Tartar despotism as this crowd of honors emanating from one man, and having his caprice for their source. Puns without end were darted against this nobility of yesterday; and a thousand expressions of the new ladies were quoted, which presumed little acquaintance with good manners. And certainly there is nothing so difficult to learn, as the kind of politeness which is neither ceremonious nor familiar: it seems a trifle, but it requires a foundation in ourselves; for no one acquires it, if it is not inspired by early habits or elevation of mind. Bonaparte himself is embarrassed on occasions of representation; and frequently in his own family, and even with foreigners, he seems to feel delighted in returning to those vulgar actions and expressions which remind him of his revolutionary youth. Bonaparte knew very well that the Parisians made pleasantries on his new nobility; but he knew also that their opinions would only be expressed in vulgar jokes, and not in strong actions. The energy of the oppressed went not beyond the equivoque of a pun; and as in the East they have been reduced to the apologue, in France they sunk still lower, namely, to the clashing of syllables. A single instance of a jeu de mots deserves, however, to survive the ephemeral success of such productions; one day as the princesses of the blood were announced, some one added, of the blood of Enghien. And in truth, such was the baptism of this new dynasty. Several of the old nobility who had been ruined by the revolution, were not unwilling to accept employments at court. It is well known by what a gross insult Bonaparte rewarded their complaisance. "I proposed to give them rank in my army, and they declined it; I offered them places in the administration, and they refused them; but when I opened my anti-chambers, they rushed into them in crowds." They had no longer any asylum but in his power. Several gentlemen, on this occasion, set an example of the most noble resistance; but how many others have represented themselves as menaced before they had the least reason for apprehension! and how many more have solicited for themselves or their families, employments at court, which all of them, ought to have spurned at! The military or the administrative careers are the only ones in which we can flatter ourselves with being useful to our country, whoever may be the chief who governs it; but employments at court render you dependant on the man, and not on the state. Registers were made to receive votes for the empire, like those which had been opened for the consulship for life; even all those who did not sign, were, as in the former instance, reckoned as voting for; and the small number of individuals who thought proper to write no, were dismissed from their employments. M. de Lafayette, the constant friend of liberty, again exhibited an invariable resistance; he had the greater merit, because already in this country of bravery, they no longer knew how to estimate courage. It is quite necessary to make this distinction, as we see the divinity of fear reign in France over the most intrepid warriors. Bonaparte would not even subject himself to the law of hereditary monarchy, but reserved the power of adopting and choosing his successor in the manner of the East. As he had then no children, he wished not to give his own family the least right; and at the very moment of his elevating them to ranks to which assuredly they had no pretensions, he subjected them to his will by profoundly combined decrees, which entwined the new thrones with chains. The fourteenth of July was again celebrated this year, (1804) because it was said the empire consecrated all the benefits of the revolution. Bonaparte had said that storms had strengthened the roots of government; he pretended that the throne would guarantee liberty: he repeated in all manner of ways, that Europe would be tranquillized by the re-establishment of monarchy in the government of France. In fact, the whole of Europe, with the exception of illustrious England, recognized his new dignity: he was styled my brother, by the knights of the ancient royal brotherhood. We have seen in what manner he has rewarded them for their fatal condescension. If he had been sincerely desirous of peace, even old King George himself, whose reign has been the most glorious in the English annals, would have been obliged to recognize him as his equal. But, a very few days after his coronation, Bonaparte pronounced some words which disclosed all his purposes: "People laugh at my new dynasty; in five years time it will be the oldest in all Europe." And from that moment he has never ceased tending towards this end. A pretext was required, to be always advancing, and this pretext was the liberty of the seas. It is quite incredible how easy it is to make the most intelligent people on earth swallow any nonsense for gospel. It is still one of those contrasts which would be altogether inexplicable, if unhappy France had not been stripped of religion and morality by a fatal concurrence of bad principles and unfortunate events. Without religion no man is capable of any sacrifice, and as without morality no one speaks the truth, public opinion is incessantly led astray. It follows therefore, as we have already said, that there is no courage of conscience, even when that of honor exists: and that with admirable intelligence in the execution, no one even asks himself what all this is to lead to? At the time that Bonaparte formed the resolution to overturn the thrones of the Continent, the sovereigns who occupied them were all of them very honorable persons. The political and military genius of the world was extinct, but the people were happy; although the principles of free constitutions were not admitted into the generality of states, the philosophical ideas which had for fifty years been spreading over Europe had at least the merit of preserving from intolerance, and mollifying the reign of despotism. Catherine II. and Frederic II. both cultivated the esteem of the French authors, and these two monarchs, whose genius might have subjected the world, lived in presence of the opinion of enlightened men and sought to captivate it. The natural bent of men's minds was directed to the enjoyment and application of liberal ideas, and there was scarcely an individual who suffered either in his person or in his property. The friends of liberty were undoubtedly in the right, in discovering that it was necessary to give the faculties an opportunity of developing themselves; that it was not just that a whole people should depend on one man; and that a national representation afforded the only means of guaranteeing the transitory benefits that might be derived from the reign of a virtuous sovereign. But what came Bonaparte to offer? Did he bring a greater liberty to foreign nations? There was not a monarch in Europe who would in a whole year have committed the acts of arbitrary insolence which signalized every day of his life. He came solely to make them exchange their tranquillity, their independence, their language, their laws, their fortunes, their blood, and their children, for the misfortune and the shame of being annihilated as nations, and despised as men. He began finally that enterprize of universal monarchy, which is the greatest scourge by which mankind can be menaced, and the certain cause of eternal war. None of the arts of peace at all suit Bonaparte: he finds no amusement but in the violent crises produced by battles. He has known how to make truces, but he has never said sincerely, enough; and his character, irreconcileable with the rest of the creation, is like the Greek fire, which no strength in nature has been known to extinguish. END OF THE FIRST PART. ADVERTISEMENT BY THE EDITOR. There is at this place in the manuscript a considerable vacuum, of which I have already given an explanation*, and which I am not sufficiently informed to make the attempt to fill up. But to put the reader in a situation to follow my mother's narrative, I will run over rapidly the principal circumstances of her life during the five years which separate the first part of these memoirs from the second. * See the Preface. On her return to Switzerland after the death of her father, the first desire she felt was to seek some alleviation of her sorrow in giving to the world the portrait of him whom she had just lost, and in collecting the last traces of his thoughts. In the Autumn of 1804, she published the MSS. of her father, with a sketch of his public and private character. My mother's health, impaired by misfortune, necessitated her to go and breathe the air of the South. She set out for Italy. The beautiful sky of Naples, the recollections of antiquity, and the chefs-d'oeuvre of art, opened to her new sources of enjoyment, to which she had been hitherto a stranger; her soul, overwhelmed with grief, seemed to revive to these new impressions, and she recovered sufficient strength to think and to write. During this journey, she was treated by the diplomatic agents of France without favor, but without injustice. She was interdicted a residence at Paris; she was banished from her friends and her habits; but tyranny had not, at least at that time, pursued her beyond the Alps; persecution had not as yet been established as a system, as it was afterwards. I even feel a real pleasure in mentioning that some letters of recommendation sent her by Joseph Bonaparte, contributed to render her residence at Rome more agreeable. She returned from Italy in the summer of 1805, and passed a year at Coppet and Geneva, where several of her friends were collected. During this period she began to write Corinne. During the following year, her attachment to France, that feeling which had so much power over her heart, made her quit Geneva and go nearer to Paris, to the distance of forty leagues from it, which was still permitted to her. I was then pursuing my studies, preparatory to entering into the Polytechnic school; and from her great goodness to her children, she wished to watch over their education, as near as her exile could allow her. She went in consequence to settle at Auxerre, a little town where she had no acquaintance, but of which the prefect, M. de la Bergerie, behaved to her with great kindness and delicacy. From Auxerre she went to Rouen: this was approaching some leagues nearer the centre to which all the recollections and all the affections of her youth attracted her. There she could at least receive letters daily from Paris; she had penetrated without any obstacle the inclosure, entrance into which had been forbidden to her; she might hope that the fatal circle would progressively be contracted. Those only who have suffered banishment will be able to understand what passed in her heart. M. de Savoie-Rollin was then prefect of the Lower Seine; it is well known by what glaring injustice he was removed some years afterwards, and I have reason to believe that his friendship for my mother, and the interest which he shewed for her, during her residence at Rouen, were no slight causes of the rigor of which he became the object. Fouche was still minister of police. His system was, as my mother has said, to do as little evil as possible, the necessity of the object admitted. The Prussian monarchy had just fallen; there was no longer any enemy upon the Continent to struggle with the government of Napoleon; no internal resistance shackled his progress, or could afford the least pretext for the employment of arbitrary measures; what motive, therefore, could he have for prolonging the most gratuitous persecution of my mother? Fouche then permitted her to come and settle at the distance of twelve leagues from Paris, upon an estate belonging to M. de Castellane. There she finished Corinne, and superintended the printing of it. In other respects, the retired life she there led, the extreme prudence of her whole conduct, and the very small number of persons who were not prevented by the fear of disgrace from coming to visit her, might have been sufficient to tranquillize the most suspicious despotism. But all this did not satisfy Bonaparte; he wanted my mother to renounce entirely the employment of her talents, and to interdict her from writing even upon subjects the most unconnected with politics. It will be seen that even at a later period this abnegation was not sufficient to preserve her from a continually increasing persecution. Scarcely had Corinne made her appearance, when a new exile commenced for my mother, and she saw all the hopes vanish, with which she had for some months been consoling herself. By a fatality which rendered her grief more pungent, it was on the 9th of April, the anniversary of her father's death, that the order which again banished her from her country, and her friends, was signified to her. She returned to Coppet, with a bleeding heart, and the prodigious success of Corinne afforded very little diversion to her sorrow. Friendship, however, succeeded in accomplishing what literary glory had failed to do; and, thanks to the proofs of affection which she received on her return to Switzerland, the summer passed more agreeably than she could have hoped. Several of her friends left Paris to come to see her, and Prince Augustus of Prussia, to whom peace had restored his liberty, did us the honor to stop several months at Coppet, prior to his return to his native country. Ever since her journey to Berlin, which had been so cruelly interrupted by the death of her father, my mother had regularly continued the study of the German literature and philosophy; but a new residence in Germany was necessary to enable her to complete the picture of that country, which she proposed to present to France. In the autumn of 1807, she set out for Vienna, and she there once more found, in the society of the Prince de Ligne, of the Princess Lubomirski, &c. &c. that urbanity of manners and ease of conversation, which had such charms in her eyes. The Austrian government, exhausted by the war, had not then the strength to be an oppressor on its own account, and notwithstanding preserved towards France, an attitude which was not without dignity and independence. The objects of Napoleon's hatred might still find an asylum at Vienna; the year she passed in that city, was therefore, the most tranquil one she had enjoyed since the commencement of her exile. On her return to Switzerland, where she spent two years in writing her reflections upon Germany, she was not long in perceiving the progress which the imperial tyranny was every day making, and the contagious rapidity with which the passion for places, and the fear of disgrace, were spreading. No doubt several friends, both at Geneva and in France, preserved to her during her misfortunes, a courageous and unshaken fidelity; but, whoever had any connection with the government, or aspired to any employment, began to keep at a distance from her house, and to dissuade timid people from approaching it. My mother suffered a great deal from all these symptoms of servitude, which she detected with incomparable sagacity; but the more unhappy she was, the more she felt the desire of diverting from the persons who were about her, the miseries of her situation, and of diffusing around her that life and intellectual movement, which solitude seemed to exclude. Her talent for declamation was the means of amusement which had the greatest influence over herself, at the same time that it varied the pleasures of her society. It was at this period, and while she was still laboring on her great work on Germany, that she composed and played at Coppet, the greater part of the little pieces which are collected in the 16th volume of her works*, under the title of Dramatic Essays. * Or the Second Volume of her OEuvres inedites. Finally, at the beginning of summer, 1810, having finished the three volumes of Germany, she wished to go and superintend the printing of them, at 40 leagues distance from Paris, a distance which was still permitted to her, and where she might hope to see again those of her old friends, whose affections had not bent before the disgrace of the Emperor. She went, therefore, to reside in the neighbourhood of Blois, in' the old castle of Chaumont-sur-Loire, which had in former times been inhabited by the Cardinal d'Amboise, Diana of Poitiers, and Catherine de Medicis. The present proprietor of this romantic residence, M. Le Ray, with whom my parents were connected by the ties of friendship and business, was then in America. But just at the time we were occupying his chateau, he returned from the United States with his family, and though he was very urgent in wishing us to remain in his house, the more he pressed us politely to do so, the more anxiety we felt, lest we should incommode him. M. de Salaberry relieved us from this embarrassment with the greatest kindness, by placing at our disposal his house at Fosse. At this period my mother's narrative recommences. Part The Second CHAPTER 1. Suppression of my Work on Germany.--Banishment from France. Being unable to remain longer in the castle of Chaumont, the proprietors of which had returned from America, I went and fixed myself at a farm called Fosse, which a generous friend lent me.* The house was inhabited by a Vendean soldier, who certainly did not keep it in the nicest order, but who had a loyal good nature that made every thing easy, and an originality of character that was very amusing. Scarcely had we arrived, when an Italian musician, whom I had with me to give lessons to my daughter, began playing upon the guitar; my daughter accompanied upon the harp the sweet voice of my beautiful friend Madame Recamier; the peasants collected round the windows, astonished to see this colony of troubadours, which had come to enliven the solitude of their master. It was there I passed my last days in France, with some friends, whose recollection lives in my heart. Certainly this intimate assemblage, this solitary residence, this agreeable occupation with the fine arts did no harm to any one. We frequently sung a charming air composed by the Queen of Holland, and of which the burden is: 'Do what you ought, happen what may'. After dinner, we had imagined the idea of seating ourselves round a green table and writing letters to each other, instead of conversing. These varied and multiplied tetes-a-tete amused us so much, that we were impatient to get from table, where we were talking, in order to go and write to one another. When any strangers came in accidentally, we could not bear the interruption of our habits; and our penny post (it is thus we called it) always went its round. The inhabitants of the neighbouring town were somewhat astonished at these new manners, and looked upon them as pedantic, while there was nothing in this game, but a resource against the monotony of solitude. One day a gentleman of the neighbourhood who had never thought of any thing in his life but the chase, came to take my boys with him into the woods; he remained sometime seated at our active but silent table; Madame Recamier wrote a little note with her beautiful hand to this jolly sportsman, in order that he might not be too much a stranger to the circle in which he was placed. He excused himself from receiving it, assuring us that he could never read writing by day-light: we laughed a little at the disappointment which the benevolent coquetry of our beautiful friend had met with, and thought that a billet from her hand would not have always had the same fate. Our life passed in this manner, without any of us, if I may judge from myself, finding the time at all burdensome. * M. de Salaberry. The opera of Cinderella was making a great noise at Paris; I wished to go and see it represented at a paltry provincial theatre at Blois. Coming out of the theatre on foot, the people of the place followed me in crowds from curiosity, more desirous of knowing me because I was an exile, than from any other motive. This kind of celebrity which I derived from misfortune, much more than from talent, displeased the minister of police, who wrote sometime after to the prefect of Loir and Cher, that I was surrounded by a court. "Certainly," said I to the prefect* "it is not power at least which gives it me." * M. de Corbigny, an amiable and intelligent man. I had always the intention of repairing to England by the way of America; but I was anxious to terminate my work on Germany. The season was now advancing; we were already at the fifteenth of September, and I began to foresee that the difficulty of embarking my daughter with me would detain me another winter, in some town, I knew not where, at forty leagues from Paris. I was then desirous that it should be Vendome, where I knew several clever people, and where the communication with the capital was easy. After having formerly had one of the most brilliant establishments in Paris, I was now contented to anticipate considerable pleasure from establishing myself at Vendome; fate however denied me even this modest happiness. On the 23d of September I corrected the last proof of Germany; after six years' labor, I felt the greatest delight in putting the word End to my three volumes. I made a list of one hundred persons to whom I wished to send copies, in different parts of France and Europe; I attached great importance to this book, which I thought well adapted to communicate new ideas to France; it appeared to me that a sentiment elevated without being hostile, had inspired it, and that people would find in it a language which was no longer spoken. Furnished with a letter from my publisher, which assured me that the censorship had authorised the publication of my work, I believed that I had nothing to apprehend, and set out with my friends for an estate of M. Mathieu de Montmorency, at five leagues from Blois. The house belonging to this estate is situated in the middle of a forest; there I walked about with the man whom I most respect in the world, since I have lost my father. The fineness of the weather, the magnificence of the forest, the historical recollections which the place recalled, being the scene of the battle of Fretteval, fought between Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, all contributed to fill my mind with the most quiet and delightful impressions. My worthy friend, who is only occupied in this world with rendering himself worthy of heaven, in this conversation, as in all those we have had together, paid no attention to affairs of the day, and only sought to do good to my soul. We resumed our journey the next day, and in these plains of the Vendomois, where you meet not with a single habitation, and which like the sea seem to present every where the same appearance, we contrived to lose ourselves completely. It was already midnight, and we knew not what road to take, in a country every where the same, and where fertility is as monotonous as sterility is elsewhere, when a young man on horseback, perceiving our embarrassment, came and requested us to pass the night in the chateau of his parents.* We accepted his invitation, which was doing us a real service, and we found ourselves all of a sudden in the midst of the luxury of Asia, and the elegance of France. The masters of the house had spent a considerable time in India, and their chateau was adorned with every thing they had brought back from their travels. This residence excited my curiosity, and I found myself extremely comfortable in it. Next day M. de Montmorency gave me a note from my son which pressed me to return home, as my work had met with fresh difficulties from the censorship. My friends who were with me in the chateau conjured me to go; I had not the least suspicion of what they were concealing from me, and thinking there was nothing but what Augustus's letter mentioned,* whiled away the time in examining the Indian curiosities without any idea of what was in store for me. At last I got into the carriage, and my brave and intelligent Vendean whom his own dangers had never moved, squeezed my hand, with tears in his eyes: I guessed immediately that they were making a mystery to me of some new persecution, and M. de Montmorency, in reply to my interrogations, at last acquainted me that the minister of the police had sent his myrmidons to destroy the ten thousand copies which had been printed of my book, and that I had received an order to quit France within three days. My children and friends had wished me not to hear this news while I was among strangers; but they had taken every possible precaution to prevent the seizure of my manuscript, and they succeeded in saving it, some hours before I was required to deliver it up. This new blow affected me most severely, I had flattered myself with an honorable success by the publication of my book: if the censors had in the first instance refused to authorise its being printed, that would have appeared to me very simple; but after having submitted to all their observations, and made all the alterations required of me, to learn that my work was destroyed, and that I must separate my self from the friends who had supported my courage, all this made me shed tears. But I endeavored once more to get the better of my feelings, in order to determine what was best to be done in a crisis where the step I was about to take might have so much influence on the fortunes of my family. As we drew near my habitation, I gave my writing desk, which contained some further notes upon my book, to my youngest son; he jumped over a wall to get into the house by the garden. An English lady*, my excellent friend, came out to meet me and inform me of all that had happened. I observed at a distance some, gendarmes who were wandering round residence, but it did not appear that they were in search of me: they were no doubt in pursuit of some other unfortunates, conscripts, exiles, persons in surveillance, or, in short, of some of the numerous classes of oppressed which the present government of France has created. * (Note of the Editor.) Uneasy at not seeing my mother arrive, I took horse to go and meet her, in order to soften as much as was in my power, the news which she had to learn upon her return; but I lost myself like her, in the uniform plains of the Vendomois, and it was only in the middle of the night that a fortunate chance conducted me to the gate of the chateau where the rites of hospitality had been given to her. I caused M. de Montmorency to be awakened, and after having informed him of this new instance of the persecution which the imperial police directed against my mother, I set off again to finish putting her papers in safety, leaving to M. de Montmorency the charge of preparing her for the new blow with which she was threatened. * Miss Randall. The prefect of Loir and Cher came to require the delivery of my manuscript: I gave him, merely to gain time, a rough copy which remained with me, and with which he was satisfied. I have learned that he was extremely ill-treated a few months afterwards, to punish him for having shewn me some attention: and the chagrin he felt at having incurred the disgrace of the emperor, was, it is said, one of the causes of the illness which carried him off in the prime of life. Unfortunate country, where the circumstances are such, that a man of his understanding and talent should sink under the chagrin of disgrace! I saw in the papers, that some American vessels had arrived in the ports of the Channel, and I determined to make use of my passport for America, in the hope that it would be possible to touch at an English port. At all events I required some days to prepare for this voyage, and I was obliged to address myself to the minister of police to ask for that indulgence. It has been already seen that the custom of the French government is to order women, as well as soldiers, to depart within twenty-four hours. Here follows the minister's reply: it is curious to observe his style*. * (Note of the Editor.) This is the same letter which was printed in the Preface to Germany, "GENERAL POLICE. MINISTER'S CABINET. Paris, 3d October, 1810. "I have received the letter, madam, which you did me the honor to write to me. Your son will have informed you that I saw no impropriety in your delaying your departure for seven or eight days: I hope they will be sufficient for the arrangements which you have yet to make, as I cannot grant you any more. "You must not seek for the cause of the order which I have signified to you, in the silence which you have observed with regard to the emperor in your last work; that would be a great mistake; he could find no place there which was worthy of him; but your exile is a natural consequence of the line of conduct you have constantly pursued for several years past. It has appeared to me that the air of this country did not at all agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for models in the nations whom you admire. "Your last work is not at all French; it is by my orders that the impression has been seized. I regret the loss which it will occasion to the bookseller; but it is not possible for me to allow it to appear. "You know, madam, that you would not have been permitted to quit Coppet but for the desire you had expressed to go to America. If my predecessor allowed you to reside in the department of Loir and Cher, you had no reason to look upon this license as any revocation of the arrangements which had been fixed with regard to you. At present you compel me to make them be strictly executed; for this you have no one to blame but yourself. "I have signified to M. Corbigny* to look to the punctual execution of the order I have given him, as soon as the term I grant you is expired. * Prefect of Loir and Cher. "I regret extremely, madam, that you have forced me to begin my correspondence with you by an act of severity; it would have been much more agreeable to me to have only had to offer you the assurance of the high consideration with which I have the honor to be, madam, "Your most humble, and most obedient servant, Signed the DUKE of ROVIGO. "P. S, I have reasons, madam, for mentioning to you that the ports of Lorient, La Rochelle, Bourdeaux, and Rochefort, are the only ones in which you can embark. I request you to let me know which of them you select*." * This postscript is easily understood; its object was to prevent me from going to England. The stale hypocrisy with which I was told that the air of this country did not agree with me, and the denial of the real cause of the suppression of my book, are worthy of remark. In fact, the minister of police had shown more frankness in expressing himself verbally respecting me: he asked, why I never named the emperor or the army in my work on Germany? On its being objected that the work being purely literary, I could not well have introduced such subjects, "Do you think," then replied the minister, "that we have made war for eighteen years in Germany, and that a person of such celebrity should print a book upon it, without saying a word about us? This book shall be destroyed, and the author deserves to be sent to Vincennes." On receiving the letter of the minister of police, I paid no attention to any part but that passage of it which interdicted me the ports of the Channel. I had already learned, that suspecting my intention of going to England, they would endeavour to prevent me. This new mortification was really above my strength to bear; on quitting my native country, I must go to that of my adoption; in banishing myself from the friends of my whole life, I required at least to find those friends of whatever is good and noble, with whom, without knowing them personally, the soul always sympathises. I saw at once all that supported my imagination crumbling to pieces; for a moment longer I would have embarked on board any vessel bound for America, in the hope of her being captured on her passage; but I was too much shaken to decide at once on so strong a resolution; and as the two alternatives of America and Coppet were the only ones that were left me, I determined on accepting the latter; for a profound sentiment always attracted me to Coppet, in spite of the disagreeables I was there subjected to. My two sons both endeavoured to see the emperor at Fontainbleau, where he then was; they were told they would be arrested if they remained there; a fortiori, I was interdicted from going to it myself. I was obliged to return into Switzerland from Blois, where I was, without approaching Paris nearer than forty leagues. The minister of police had given notice, in corsair terms, that at thirty-eight leagues I was a good prize. In this manner, when the emperor exercises the arbitrary power of banishment, neither the exiled persons, nor their friends, nor even their children, can reach his presence to plead the cause of the unfortunates who are thus torn from the objects of their affection and their habits; and these sentences of exile, which are now irrevocable, particularly where women are the objects, and which the emperor himself has rightly termed proscriptions, are pronounced without the possibility of making any justification be heard, supposing always that the crime of having displeased the emperor admits of any. Although the forty leagues were ordered me, I was necessitated to pass through Orleans, a very dull town, but inhabited by several very pious ladies, who had retired thither for an asylum. In walking about the town on foot, I stopped before the monument erected to the memory of Joan of Arc: certainly, thought I to myself, when she delivered France from the power of the English, that same France was much more free, much more France than it is at present. One feels a singular sensation in wandering through a town, where you neither know, nor are known to a soul. I felt a kind of bitter enjoyment in picturing to myself my isolated situation in its fullest extent, and in still looking at that France which I was about to quit, perhaps for ever, without speaking to a person, or being diverted from the impression which the country itself made upon me. Occasionally persons passing stopped to look at me, from the circumstance I suppose of my countenance having, in spite of me, an expression of grief; but they soon went on again, as it is long since mankind have been accustomed to witness persons suffering. At fifty leagues from the Swiss frontier, France is bristled with citadels, houses of detention, and towns serving as prisons; and every where you see nothing but individuals deprived of their liberty by the will of one man, conscripts of misfortune, all chained at a distance from the places where they would have wished to live. At Dijon, some Spanish prisoners, who had refused to take the oath, regularly came every day to the market place to feel the sun at noon, as they then regarded him rather as their countryman; they wrapt themselves up in a mantle, frequently in rags, but which they knew how to wear with grace, and they gloried in their misery, as it arose from their boldness; they hugged themselves in their sufferings, as associating them with the misfortunes of their intrepid country. They were sometimes seen going into a coffee house, solely to read the newspaper, in order to penetrate the fate of their friends through the lies of their enemies; their countenances were then immoveable, but not without expression, exhibiting strength under the command of their will. Farther on, at Auxonne, was the residence of the English prisoners, who had the day before saved from fire, one of the houses of the town where they were kept confined. At Besancon, there were more Spaniards. Among the French exiles to be met with in every part of France, an angelic creature inhabited the citadel of Besancon, in order not to quit her father. For a long period, and amidst every sort of danger, Mademoiselle de Saint Simon shared the fortunes of him who had given her birth. At the entrance of Switzerland, on the top of the mountains which separate it from France, you see the castle of Joux, in which prisoners of state are detained, whose names frequently never reach the ear of their relations. In this prison Toussaint Louverture actually perished of cold; he deserved his fate on account of his cruelty, but the emperor had the least right to inflict it upon him, as he had engaged to guarantee to him his life and liberty. I passed a day at the foot of this castle, during very dreadful weather, and I could not help thinking of this negro transported all at once into the Alps, and to whom this residence was the hell of ice; I thought of the more noble beings, who had been shut up there, of those who were still groaning in it, and I said to myself also that if I was there, I should never quit it with life. It is impossible to convey an idea to the small number of free nations which remain upon the earth, of that absence of all security, the habitual state of the human creatures who live under the empire of Napoleon. In other despotic governments there are laws, and customs, and a religion, which the sovereign never infringes, however absolute he may be; but in France, and in Europe France, as every thing is new, the past can be no guarantee, and every thing may be feared as well as hoped according as you serve, or not, the interests of the man who dares to propose himself, as the sole object of the existence of the whole human race. CHAPTER 2. Return to Coppet.--Different persecutions. In returning to Coppet, dragging my wing like the pigeon in Lafontaine, I saw the rainbow rise over my father's house; I dared take my part in this token of the covenant; there had been nothing in my sorrowful journey to prevent me from aspiring to it. I was then almost resigned to living in this chateau, renouncing the idea of ever publishing more on any subject; but it was at least necessary, in making the sacrifice of talents, which I flattered myself with possessing, to find happiness in my affections, and this is the manner in which my private life was arranged, after having stript me of my literary existence. The first order received by the prefect of Geneva, was to intimate to my two sons, that they were interdicted going into France without a new permission of the police. This was to punish them for having wished to speak to Bonaparte in favor of their mother. Thus the morality of the present government is to loosen family ties, in order to substitute in all cases the emperor's will. Several generals have been mentioned as declaring, that if Napoleon ordered them to throw their wives and children into the river, they would not hesitate to obey him. The translation of this is, that they prefer the money which the emperor gives them, to the family which they have from nature. There are many instances of this way of thinking, but there are few who would have impudence enough to give utterance to it. I felt a mortal grief at seeing for the first time my situation bear upon my sons, scarcely entered into life. We feel ourselves very firm in our own conduct, when it is founded on sincere conviction; but when others begin to suffer on our account, it is almost impossible to keep from reproaching ourselves. Both my sons, however, most generously diverted this feeling from me, and we supported each other mutually by the recollection of my father. A few days afterwards the prefect of Geneva wrote me a second letter, to require me, in the name of the minister of police, to deliver up the proof sheets of my book which were still in my hands; the minister knew exactly the number I had sent and kept, and his spies had done their duty well. In my answer, I gave him the satisfaction of admitting that he had been correctly informed; but I told him at the same time that this copy was not in Switzerland, and that I neither could nor would give it up. I added, however, that I would engage never to have it printed on the Continent, and I had no great merit in making this promise, for what Continental government would then have suffered the publication of any book forbidden, by the emperor? A short time afterwards, the prefect of Geneva* was dismissed, and it was generally believed on my account; he was one of my friends, yet he had not deviated one iota from the orders he had received: although he was one of the most honorable and enlightened men in France, his principles led him to the scrupulous obedience of the government, whose servant he was; but no ambitious view, or personal calculation gave him the zeal required. It was another great source of chagrin to be, or to be regarded as being, the cause of the dismissal of such a man. He was generally regretted in his department, and from the moment it was believed that I was the cause of his disgrace, all who had any pretensions to places avoided my house as they would the most fatal contagion. There still remained to me, however at Geneva, more friends than any other provincial town in France could have offered me; for the inheritance of liberty has left in that city much generous feeling; but it is impossible to have an idea of the anxiety one feels, when one is afraid of compromising those who come to visit you. I made a point of getting the most exact information of all the relations of any lady before I invited her; for if she had only a cousin who wanted a place, or had one, it was demanding an act of Roman heroism to expect her to come and dine with me. At last, in the month of March 1811, a new prefect arrived from Paris. He was a man admirably well adapted to the reigning system: that is to say, having a very general acquaintance with facts, coupled with a total absence of principles in matters of government; calling every fixed rule mere abstraction, and placing his conscience in devotion to the reigning power. The first time I saw him, he told me that talents like mine were made to celebrate the emperor, who was a subject well worthy of the kind of enthusiasm which I had shown in Corinna. I gave him for answer, that persecuted as I was by the emperor, any thing like praise of him coming from me, would have the air of a petition, and that I was persuaded that the emperor himself would find my eulogiums very ridiculous under such circumstances. He combatted this opinion very strongly: he returned to my house several times to beg me, in the name of my own interest, as he styled it, to write something in favor of the emperor, were it but a sheet of four pages; that would be sufficient, he assured me, to put an end to all the disagreeables I suffered. He repeated what he told me to every person of my acquaintance. Finally, one day he came to propose to me to celebrate in verse the birth of the king of Rome; I told him, laughing, that I had not a single idea on the subject, and that I should confine myself to wishes for his having a good nurse. This joke put an end to the prefect's negociations with me, upon the necessity of my writing in favor of the present government. * M. de Barante, father of M. Prosper de Barante, member of the * Chamber of Peers. A short time afterwards the physicians ordered my youngest son the baths of Aix, in Savoy, at twenty leagues from Coppet. I chose the early part of May to go there, a time of the year when the waters are quite deserted. I gave the prefect notice of this little journey, and went to shut myself up in a kind of village, where there was not at the time a single person of my acquaintance. I had hardly been there ten days, before a courier arrived from the prefect of Geneva to order me to return. The prefect of Mont-Blanc, in whose department I was, was also afraid lest I should leave Aix to go to England, as he said, to write against the emperor; and although London was not very near to Aix in Savoy, he sent his gendarmes every where about, to forbid my being furnished with post horses on the road. I am at present tempted to laugh at all this prefectorial activity against a poor thing like myself; but at that time the very sight of a gendarme was enough to make me die with fright. I was always alarmed lest from a banishment so rigorous the change might shortly be to a prison, which was to me more terrible than death itself. I knew that if I was once arrested, that if this eclat were once got over, the emperor would not allow himself again to be spoken to about me, even if any one had the courage to do so; which was not very probable at that court, where terror was the prevailing sentiment every minute of the day, and in the most trifling concerns of life. On my return to Geneva, the prefect signified to me not only that he forbid me from going under any pretence to the countries united to France, but that he advised me not to travel in Switzerland, and never to go in any direction beyond two leagues from Coppet. I objected to him that being domiciliated in Switzerland, I did not clearly understand by what right a French authority could forbid me from travelling in a foreign country. The prefect no doubt thought me rather a simpleton to discuss at that moment a point of right, repeated his advice to me in a tone singularly approaching to an order. I confined myself my protest: but the very next day I learned that one of the most distinguished literati of Germany, M. Schlegel, who had for eight years been employed in the education of my sons, had received an order not only to leave Geneva, but to quit Coppet. I wished still to represent that in Switzerland the prefect of Geneva had no orders to give; but I was told, that if I liked better to receive this order through the French ambassador, I might be gratified: that the ambassador would address the landamann, and the landamann would apply to the canton of Vaud, who would immediately send M. Schlegel from my house. By making despotism go this roundabout, I might have gained ten days, but nothing more. I then wished to know why I was deprived of the society of M. Schlegel, my own friend, and that of my children. The prefect, who was accustomed, like the greater part of the emperor's agents, to couple very smooth words with very harsh acts, told me that it was from regard to me that the government banished M. Schlegel from my house as he made me an Anti-gallican. Much affected by this proof of the paternal care of the government, I asked what Mr. S. had ever done against France: the prefect objected to his literary opinions, and referred among other things to a pamphlet of his, in which, in a comparison between the Phedra of Euripides and that of Racine, he had given the preference to the former. How very delicate for a Corsican monarch to take in this manner act and cause (sic) for the slightest shades of French literature! But the real truth was, M. Schlegel was banished because he was my friend, because his conversation animated my solitude, and because the system was now begun to be acted upon, which soon became evident, of making a prison of my soul, in tearing from me every enjoyment of intellect and friendship. I resumed the resolution of leaving Switzerland, which the pain of quitting my friends and the ashes of my parents had made me so often give up; but there remained a very difficult problem to solve, and that was to find the means of departure. The French government threw so many difficulties in the way of a passport for America, that I durst no longer think of that plan. Besides, I had reason to be afraid lest at the moment of my embarkation they should pretend to have discovered that I was going to England, and that the decree might be applied to me, which condemned to imprisonment all who attempted to go there without the authority of the government. It seemed to me, therefore, much preferable to go to Sweden, that honorable country, whose new chief already gave indications of the glorious conduct which he has since known how to sustain. But by what road to get to Sweden? The prefect had given me to understand in all ways, that wherever France commanded, I should be arrested, and how was I to reach the point where she did not command? I must necessarily pass through Russia, as the whole of Germany was under the French dominion. But to get to Russia, I must cross Bavaria and Austria. I could trust my self in the Tyrol, although it was united to a state of the confederation, on account of the courage which its unfortunate inhabitants had shewn. As to Austria, in spite of the fatal debasement into which she had sunk, I had sufficient confidence in her monarch to believe that he would not deliver me up; but I knew also that he could not defend me. After having sacrificed the ancient honor of his house, what strength remained to him of any kind? I spent my days, therefore, in studying the map of Europe to escape from it, as Napoleon studied it to make himself its master, and my campaign, as well as his, always had Russia for its field. This power was the last asylum of the oppressed; it was therefore that which the conqueror of Europe wished to overthrow. CHAPTER 3. Journey in Switzerland with M. de Montmorency. Determined to go by the way of Russia, I required a passport to enter it. But a fresh difficulty occurred; I must write to Petersburgh to obtain this passport: such was the formality which circumstances rendered necessary; and although I was certain of meeting with no refusal from the known generous character of the emperor Alexander, I had reason to be afraid that in the ministerial offices it might be mentioned that I had asked for a passport, and in that way get to the French ambassador's ears, which would lead to my arrest, and prevent me from executing my project. It was necessary, therefore, to go first to Vienna, to ask for my passport from thence, and there wait for it. The six weeks which would be required to send my letter and receive an answer, would be passed under the protection of a ministry which had given the archduchess of Austria to Bonaparte;-could I trust myself to it? It was clear, however, that by remaining as a hostage, under the hand of Napoleon, I not only renounced the exercise of my own talents, but I prevented my sons from following any public career; they could enter into no service, either for Bonaparte or against him; it was impossible to find an establishment for my daughter, as it was necessary either to separate myself from her, or to confine her to Coppet; and yet if I was arrested in my flight, there was an end of the fortune of my children, who would not have wished to separate themselves from my destiny. It was in the midst of all these perplexities, that a friend of twenty years standing, M. Mathieu de Montmorency proposed to come and see me, as he had already done several times since my exile. It is true that I was written to from Paris, that the Emperor had expressed his displeasure against everyone who should go to Coppet, and especially against M. de Montmorency, if he again went there. But I confess I made light of these expressions of the Emperor, which he throws out sometimes to terrify people, and struggled very feebly with M. de Montmorency, who generously sought to tranquillize me by his letters. I was wrong, no doubt; but who could have persuaded themselves that an old friend of a banished woman would have it charged to him as a crime, his going to spend a few days with her. The life of M. de Montmorency, entirely consecrated to works of piety, or to family affections, estranged him so completely from all politics, that unless it would even go the length of banishing the saints, it seemed to me impossible that the government would attack such a man. I asked myself likewise, cui bono; a question I have always put to myself whenever any action of Napoleon was in discussion. I know that he will, without hesitation, do all the evil which can be of use to him for the least thing; but I do not always conjecture the lengths to which his prodigious egotism extends in all directions, towards the infinitely little, as well as the infinitely great. Although the prefect had made me be told that he recommended me not to travel in Switzerland, I paid no attention to an advice which could not be made a formal order. I went to meet M. de Montmorency at Orbd, and from thence I proposed to him, as the object of a promenade in Switzerland, to return by way of Fribourg, to see the establishment of female Trappists, at a short distance front that of the men in Val-Sainte. We reached the convent in the midst of a severe shower, after having been obliged to come nearly a mile on foot. As we were flattering ourselves with being admitted, the Procureur of la Trappe, who has the direction of the female convent, told us that nobody could be received there. I tried, however, to ring the bell at the gate of the cloister; a nun appeared behind the latticed opening through which the portress may speak to strangers. "What do you want?" said she to me, in a voice without modulation as we might suppose that of a ghost. "I should wish to see the interior of your convent."--"That is impossible."--"But I am very wet, and want to dry myself."--She immediately touched a spring which opened the door of an outer apartment, in which I was allowed to rest myself; but no living creature appeared. I had hardly been seated a few minutes, when becoming impatient at being unable to penetrate into the interior of the house, I rung again; the same person again appeared, and I asked her if no females were ever admitted into the convent; she answered that it was only in cases when any one had the intention of becoming a nun. "But," said I to her, "how can I know if I wish to remain in your house, if I am not permitted to examine it."--"Oh, that is quite useless," replied she, "I am very sure that you have no vocation for our state," and with these words immediately shut her wicket. I know not by what signs this nun had satisfied herself of my worldly dispositions; it is possible that a quick manner of speaking, so different from theirs, is sufficient to make them distinguish travellers, who are merely curious. The hour of vespers approaching, I could go into the church to hear the nuns sing; they were behind a black plose grating, through which nothing could be seen. You only heard the noise of their wooden shoes, and of the wooden benches as they raised them to sit down. Their singing had nothing of sensibility in it, and I thought I could remark both by their manner of praying, and in the conversation which I had afterwards with the father Trappist, who directed them, that it was not religious enthusiasm, such as we conceive it, but severe and grave habits which could support such a kind of life. The tenderness of piety would even exhaust the strength; a sort of ruggedness of soul is necessary to so rude an existence. The new Father Abbe of the Trappists, settled in the vallies of the Canton of Fribourg, has added to the austerities of the order. One can have no idea of the minute degrees of suffering imposed upon the monks; they go so far as even to forbid them, when they have been standing for some hours in succession, from leaning against the wall, or wiping the perspiration from their forehead; in short every moment of their life is filled with suffering, as the people of the world fills theirs with enjoyment. They rarely live to be old, and those to whom this lot falls, regard it as a punishment from heaven. Such an establishment would be barbarous if any one was compelled to enter it, or if there was the least concealment of what they suffer there. But on the contrary, they distribute to whoever wishes to read it, a printed statement, in which the rigors of the order are rather exaggerated than softened; and yet there are novices who are willing to take the vows, and those who are received never run away, although they might do it without the least difficulty. The whole rests, as it appears to me, upon the powerful idea of death; the institutions and amusements of society are destined in the world to turn our thoughts entirely upon life; but when the contemplation of death gets a certain hold of the human heart, joined to a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, there are no bounds to the disgust which it may take to every thing which forms a subject of interest in the world; and a state of suffering appearing the road to a future life, such minds follow it with avidity, like the traveller, who willingly fatigues himself, in order to get sooner over the road which leads him to the object of his wishes. But what equally astonished and grieved me, was to see children brought up with this severity: their poor locks shaved off, their young countenances already furrowed, that deathly dress with which they were covered before they knew any thing of life, before they had voluntarily renounced it, all this made my soul revolt against the parents who had placed them there. When such a state is not the adoption of a free and determined choice on the part of the person who professes it, it inspires as much horror as it at first created respect. The monk with whom I conversed, spoke of nothing but death; all his ideas came from that subject, or connected themselves with it; death is the sovereign monarch of this residence. As we talked of the temptations of the world, I expressed to the father Trappist my admiration of his conduct in thus sacrificing all, to withdraw himself from their influence. "We are cowards" said he to me, "who have retired into a fortress, because we feel we want the courage to meet our enemy in the open field." This reply was equally modest and ingenious*. A few days after we had visited these places, the French government ordered the seizure of the father Abbe, M. de L'Estrange; the confiscation of the property of the order, and the dismissal of the fathers from Switzerland. * (Note of the Editor.)I accompanied my mother in the excursion here related. Struck with the wild beauty of the place, and interested by the spiritual conversation of the Trappist who had attended us, I besought him to grant me hospitality until the following day, as I proposed going over the mountain on foot, in order to see the great convent of the Val-Sainte, and rejoining my mother and M. de Montmorency at Fribourg. This monk, with whom I continued to converse, had not much difficulty in discovering that I hated the imperial government, and I could guess that he fully participated in that sentiment. Afterwards, after thanking him for his kindness, I entirely lost sight of him, nor did I imagine, that he had preserved the least recollection of me. Five years afterwards, in the first months of the Restoration, I was not a little surprised at receiving a letter from this same Trappist. He had no doubt, he said, that now the legitimate monarch was restored to his throne, I must have a number of friends at court, and he requested me to employ their influence in procuring to his order the restoration of the property which it possessed in France. This letter was signed "Father A .... priest and procureur of La Trappe," and he added, as a postscript, "If a twenty-three years' emigration' and four campaigns in a regiment of horse-chasseurs in the army of Conde, give me any claims to the royal favor, I beg you will make use of them." I could not help laughing, both at the idea which this good monk had of my influence at court, and at the use of it which he required from a protestant. I sent his letter to M. de Montmorency, whose influence was much greater than mine, and I have reason to believe that the petition was granted. In other respects, these Trappists were not, in the deep vales of the Canton of Fribourg, such strangers to politics as their residence and their habit would lead one to believe. I have since learned that they served as a medium for the correspondence of the French clergy with the pope, then a prisoner at Savonne. Certainly, although this does not at all excuse the rigor with which they were treated by Bonaparte, it gives a sufficient explanation of it. (End of editor's note.) I know not of what M. de L'Estrange was accused; but it is scarcely probable that such a man should have meddled with the affairs of the world, much less the monks, who never quitted their solitude. The Swiss government caused search to be made every where for M. de L'Estrange, and I hope for its honor, that it took care not to find him. However, the unfortunate magistrates of countries which are called allies of France, are very often employed to arrest persons designated to them, ignorant whether they are delivering innocent or guilty victims to the great Leviathan, which thinks proper to swallow them up. The property of the Trappists was seized, that is to say, their tomb, for they hardly possessed any thing else, and the order was dispersed. It is said, that a Trappist at Genoa had mounted the pulpit to retract the oath of allegiance which he had taken to the emperor, declaring that since the captivity of the pope, he considered every priest as released from this oath. At his coming out from performing this act of repentance, he was, report also says, tried by a military commission, and shot. One would think that he was sufficiently punished, without rendering the whole order responsible for his conduct. We regained Vevay by the mountains, and I proposed to M. de Montmorency to proceed as far as the entrance of the Valais, which I had never seen. We stopped at Bex, the last Swiss village, for the Valais was already united to France. A Portuguese brigade had left Geneva to go and occupy the Valais: singular state of Europe, to have a Portuguese garrison at Geneva going to take possession of a part of Switzerland in the name of France! I had a curiosity to see the Cretins of the Valais, of whom I had so often heard. This miserable degradation of man affords ample subject for reflection; but it is excessively painful to see the human countenance thus become an object of horror and repugnance. I remarked, however, in several of these poor creatures, a degree of vivacity bordering on astonishment, produced on them by external objects. As they never recognize what they have already seen, they feel each time fresh surprize, and the spectacle of the world, with all its details, is thus for ever new to them; it is, perhaps, the compensation for their sad state, for certainly there is one. It is some years since a Cretin, having committed assassination, was condemned to death: as he was led to the scaffold, he took it into his head, seeing himself surrounded with a crowd of people, that he was accompanied in this manner to do him honor, and he laughed, held himself erect, and put his dress in order, with the idea of rendering himself more worthy of the fete. Was it right to punish such a being for the crime which his arm had committed? There is at three leagues from Bex, a famous cascade, where the water falls from a very lofty mountain. I proposed to my friends to go and see it, and we returned before dinner. It is true that this cascade was upon the territory of the Valais, consequently then upon the French territory, and I forgot that I was not allowed more of that than the small space of ground which separates Coppet from Geneva. When I returned home, the prefect not only blamed me for having presumed to travel in Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: *Je tondu de ce pre la largeur de ma langue (I grazed of this meadow the breadth of my tongue.) But I confessed with great simplicity the fault I had committed in going to see this Swiss cascade, without dreaming that it was in France. CHAPTER 4. Exile of M. de Montmorency and Madame Recamier--New persecutions. This continual chicanery upon my most trifling actions, rendered my life odious to me, and I could not divert myself by occupation; for the recollection of the fate of my last work, and the certainty of never being able to publish any thing in future, operated as a complete damper to my mind, which requires emulation to be capable of labor. Notwithstanding, I could not yet resolve to quit for ever the borders of France, the abode of my father, and the friends who remained faithful to me. Every day I thought of departing, and every day I found in my own mind some reason for remaining, until the last blow was aimed at my soul; God knows what I have suffered from it. M. de Montmorency came to pass several days with me at Coppet, and the wickedness of detail in the master of so great an empire is so well calculated, that by the return of the courier who announced his arrival at Coppet, my friend received his letter of exile. The emperor would not have been satisfied if this order had not been signified to him at my house, and if there had not been in the letter itself of the minister of police, a word to signify that I was the cause of this exile. M. de Montmorency endeavoured, in every possible way, to soften the news to me, but, I tell it to Bonaparte, that he may applaud himself on the success of his scheme, I shrieked with agony on learning the calamity which I had drawn on the head of my generous friend; and never was my heart, tried as it had been for so many years, nearer to despair. I knew not how to lull the rending thoughts which succeeded each other in my bosom, and had recourse to opium to suspend for some hours the anguish which I felt. M. do Montmorency, calm and religious, invited me to follow his example; the consciousness of the devotedness to me which he had condescended to show, supported him: but for me, I reproached myself for the bitter consequences of this devotedness, which now separated him from his family and friends. I prayed to the Almighty without ceasing, but grief would not quit its hold of me for a moment, and life became a burden to me. While I was in this state, I received a letter from Madame Recamier, that beautiful person who has received the admiration of the whole of Europe, and who has never abandoned an unfortunate friend. She informed me, that on her road to the waters of Aix in Savoy, to which she was proceeding, she intended stopping at my house, and would be there in two days. I trembled lest the lot of M. de Montmorency should also become hers. However improbable it was, I was ordained to fear every thing from hatred so barbarous and minute, and I therefore sent a courier to meet Madame Recamier, to beseech her not to come to Coppet. To know that she who had never failed to console me with the most amiable attention was only a few leagues distant from me; to know that she was there, so near to my habitation, and that I was not allowed to see her again, perhaps for the last time! all this I was obliged to bear. I conjured her not to stop at Coppet; she would not yield to my entreaties; she could not pass under my windows without remaining some hours with me, and it was with convulsions of tears that I saw her enter this chateau, in which her arrival had always been a fete. She left me the next day, and repaired instantly to one of her relations at fifty leagues distance from Switzerland. It was in vain; the fatal blow of exile smote her also; she had had the intention of seeing me, and that was enough; for the generous compassion which had inspired her, she must be punished. The reverses of fortune which she had met with made the destruction of her natural establishment extremely painful to her. Separated from all her friends, she has passed whole months in a little provincial town, a prey to the extremes of every feeling of insipid and melancholy solitude. Such was the lot to which I was the cause of condemning the most brilliant female of her time; and thus regardless did the chief of the French, that people so renowned for their gallantry, show himself towards the most beautiful woman in Paris. In one day he smote virtue and distinguished birth in M. de Montmorency; beauty in Madame Recamier, and if I dare say it, the reputation of high talents in myself. Perhaps he also flattered himself with attacking the memory of my father in his daughter, in order that it might be truly said that in this world, under his reign, the dead and the living, piety, beauty, wit, and celebrity, all were as nothing. Persons made themselves culpable by being found wanting in the delicate shades of flattery towards him, in refusing to abandon any one who had been visited by his disgrace. He recognises but two classes of human creatures, those who serve him, and those, who without injuring, wish to have an existence independent of him. He is unwilling that in the whole universe, from the details of housekeeping to the direction of empires, a single will should act without reference to his. "Madam de Stael," said the prefect of Geneva, "has contrived to make herself a very pleasant life at Coppet; her friends and foreigners come to see her: the emperor will not allow that." And why did he torment me in this manner? that I might print an eulogium upon him: and of what consequence was this eulogium to him, among the millions of phrases which fear and hope were constantly offering at his shrine? Bonaparte once said: "If I had the choice, either of doing a noble action myself, or of inducing my adversary to do a mean one, I would not hesitate to prefer the debasement of my enemy." In this sentence you have the explanation of the particular pains which he took to torment my existence. He knew that I was attached to my friends, to France, to my works, to my tastes, to society; in taking from me every thing which composed my happiness, his wish was to trouble me sufficiently to make me write some piece of insipid flattery, in the hope that it would obtain me my recall. In refusing to lend myself to his wishes, I ought to say it, I have not had the merit of making a sacrifice; the emperor wished me to commit a meanness, but a meanness entirely useless; for at a time when success was in a manner deified, the ridicule would not have been complete, if I had succeeded in returning to Paris, by whatever means I had effected it. To satisfy our master, whose skill in degrading whatever remains of lofty mind is unquestionable, it was necessary that I should dishonor myself in order to obtain my return to France,--that he should turn into mockery my zeal in praise of him, who had never ceased to persecute me,--and that this zeal should not be of the least service to me. I have denied him this truly refined satisfaction; it is all the merit I have had in the long contest which has subsisted between his omnipotence and my weakness. M. de Montmorency's family, in despair at his exile, were anxious, as was natural, that he should separate himself from the sad cause of this calamity, and I saw that friend depart without knowing if he would ever again honor with his presence my residence on this earth. On the 31st of August, 1811, I broke the first and last of the ties which bound me to my native country; I broke them, at least so far as regards human connections, which can no longer exist between us; but I never lift my eyes towards heaven without thinking of my excellent friend, and I venture to believe also, that in his prayers he answers me. Beyond this, fate has denied me all other correspondence with him. When the exile of my two friends became known, I was assailed by a whole host of chagrins of every kind; but a great misfortune renders us in a manner insensible to fresh troubles. It was reported that the minister of police had declared that he would have a soldier's guard mounted at the bottom of the avenue of Coppet, to arrest whoever came to see me. The prefect of Geneva, who was instructed, by order of the emperor he said, to annul me (that was his expression), never missed an opportunity of insinuating, or even declaring publicly, that no one who had any thing either to hope or fear from the government ought to venture near me. M. de Saint-Priest, formerly minister of Louis XVI. and the colleague of my father, honored me with his affection; his daughters who dreaded, and with reason, that he might be sent from Geneva, united their entreaties with mine that he would abstain from visiting me. Notwithstanding, in the middle of winter, at the age of seventy-eight, he was banished not only from Geneva, but from Switzerland; for it is fully admitted, as has been seen in my own case, that the emperor can banish from Switzerland as well as from France; and when any objections are made to the French agents, on the score of being in a foreign country, whose independence is recognised, they shrug up their shoulders, as if you were wearying them with Metaphysical quibbles. And really it is a perfect quibble to wish to distinguish in Europe anything but prefect-kings, and prefects receiving their orders directly from the emperor of France. If there is any difference between the soi-disant allied countries and the French provinces, it is that the first are rather worse treated. There remains in France a certain recollection of having been called the great nation, which sometimes obliges the emperor to be measured in his proceedings; it was so at least, but every day even that becomes less necessary. The motive assigned for the banishment of M. de Saint-Priest was, that he had not induced his sons to abandon the service of Russia. His sons had, during the emigration, met with the most generous reception in Russia; they had there been promoted, their intrepid courage had there been properly rewarded; they were covered with wounds, they were distinguished among the first for their military talents; the eldest was now more than thirty years of age. How was it possible for a father to ask that the existence of his sons, thus established, should be sacrificed to the honor of coming to place themselves en surveillance on the French territory? for that was the enviable lot which was reserved for them. It was a source of melancholy satisfaction to me, that I had not seen M. de Saint-Priest for four months previous to his banishment; had it not been for that, no one would have doubted that it was I who had infected him with the contagion of my disgrace. Not only Frenchmen, but foreigners, were apprised that they must not go to my house. The prefect kept upon the watch to prevent even old friends from seeing me. One day, among others, he deprived me, by his official vigilance, of the society of a German gentleman, whose conversation was extremely agreeable to me, and I could not help telling him, on this occasion, that he might have spared himself this extraordinary degree of persecution. "How!" replied he, "it was to do you a service that I acted in this manner; I made your friend sensible that he would compromise you by going to see you." I could not refrain from a smile at this ingenious argument. "Yes," continued he with the most perfect gravity, "the emperor, seeing you preferred to himself, would be displeased with you for it." "So that" I replied, "the emperor expects that my private friends, and shortly, perhaps, my own children, should forsake me to please him; that seems to me rather too much. Besides, I do not well see how a person in my situation can be compromised; and what you say reminds me of a revolutionist who was applied to, in the times of terror, to use his endeavours to save one of his friends from the scaffold. I am afraid, said he, that my speaking in his favor would only injure him." The prefect smiled at my quotation, but continued that train of reasoning, which, backed as it is with four hundred thousand bayonets, always appears the soundest. A man at Geneva said to me, "Do not you think that the prefect declares his opinion with a great deal of frankness?" "Yes," I replied, "he says with sincerity that he is devoted to the man of power; he says with courage that he is of the strongest side; I am not exactly sensible of the merit of such an avowal." Several independent ladies at Geneva continued to show me marks of the greatest kindness, of which I shall always retain a deep recollection. But even to the clerks in the custom houses, regarded themselves as in a state of diplomacy with me; and from prefects to sub-prefects, and from the cousins of one and the other, a profound terror would have seized them all, if I had not spared them, as much as was in my power, the anxiety of paying or not paying a visit. Every courier brought reports of other friends of mine being exiled from Paris, for having kept up connections with me; it became a matter of strict duty for me to avoid seeing a single Frenchman of the least note; and very often I was even apprehensive of injuring persons in the country where I was living, whose courageous friendship never failed itself towards me. I felt two opposite sensations, and both, I believe, equally natural; melancholy at being forsaken, and cruel anxiety for those who showed attachment to me. It is difficult to conceive a situation in life more painful at every moment; for the space of nearly two years that I endured it, I may say truly that I never once saw the day return without a feeling of desolation at having to support the existence which that day renewed. But why should not you leave it then? will be said, and was said incessantly to me from all quarters. A man whom I ought not to name*, but who I trust knows how much I esteem the elevation of his character and conduct, said to me: "If you remain, he will treat you as Elizabeth did Mary Stuart:--nineteen years of misery, and the catastrophe at last." Another person, witty but unguarded in his expressions, wrote to me, that it was dishonorable to remain after so much ill-treatment. I had no need of these recommendations to wish, passionately wish, to depart; from the moment that I could no longer see my friends, that I was only a burden to my children's existence, was it not time to determine? The prefect, however, repeated in every possible way, that if I went off, I should be seized; that at Vienna, as well as at Berlin, I should be reclaimed; and that I could not make the least preparation for departure without his being informed of it; for he knew, he said, every thing that passed in my house. In that respect he was a boaster, and, as the event has proved, exhibited mere fatuity in matters of espionnage. But who would not have been terrified at the tone of assurance with which he told all my friends that I could not move a step without being seized by the gendarmes! * Count Elzearn de Sabran. CHAPTER 5. Departure from Coppet. I passed eight months in a state I cannot describe, every day making a trial of my courage, and every day shrinking at the idea of a prison. All the world certainly fears it; but my imagination has such a dread of solitude, my friends are so necessary to me, to support and animate me, and to turn my attention to a new perspective when I sink under the intensity of painful sensations, that never has death presented itself to me under such terrible features as a prisoner a dungeon, where I might remain for years without ever hearing a friendly voice. I have been told that one of the Spaniards who defended Saragossa with the most astonishing intrepidity, utters the most dreadful shrieks in the tower at Vincennes, where he is kept confined; so much does this frightful solitude affect even the most energetic minds! Besides, I could not disguise from myself that I was not courageous; I have a bold imagination, but a timid character, and all kinds of perils appear to me like phantoms. The species of talent which I possess brings images to me with such living freshness, that if the beauties of nature are improved by it, dangers are made more dreadful. Sometimes I was afraid of a prison, sometimes of robbers, if I was obliged to go through Turkey, in the event of Russia being shut against me by political combinations: sometimes also the immense sea which I must cross between Constantinople and London, filled me with terror for my daughter and myself. Nevertheless I had always the wish to depart; an inward feeling of boldness excited me to it; but I might say, like a well known Frenchman, "I tremble at the dangers to which my courage is about to expose me." In truth, what adds to the horrible barbarity of persecuting females, is, that their nature is both irritable and weak; they suffer more acutely from trouble, and are less capable of the strength required to escape from it. I was also affected by another kind of terror: I was afraid that the moment the emperor knew of my departure, he would insert in the newspapers one of those articles which he knows so well how to dictate, when he wishes to commit moral assassination. A senator told me one day, that Napoleon was the best journalist he ever knew; and certainly if this expression meant to designate the art of defaming individuals and nations, he possesses it in the highest degree. Nations are not affected by it; but he has acquired in the revolutionary times he has passed through, a certain tact in calumnies suitable to vulgar comprehension, which makes him find the expressions best adapted for circulation among those whose wit is confined to repeating the phrases published by the government for their use. If the Moniteur accused any one of robbing on the highway, no French, German, or Italian journal could admit his justification. It is almost impossible to represent to one's self what a man is, at the head of a million of soldiers, and possessed of ten millions of revenue, having all the prisons of Europe at his disposal, with the kings for his gaolers, and using the press as his mouth-piece, at a time when people have hardly the intimacy of friendship to make a reply; finally, with the ability of turning misfortune into ridicule: execrable power, whose ironical enjoyment is the last insult which the infernal genii can make the human race endure! Whatever independence of character one had, I believe that no one could refrain from shuddering at the idea of having such power directed against one's self; at least I confess having felt this movement very strongly; and in spite of the melancholy of my situation, I frequently said to myself, that a roof for shelter, a table for sustenance, and a garden for exercise, formed a lot with which one must learn to be contented; but even this lot, such as it was, no one could be certain of retaining in peace; a word might escape, a word might be repeated, and this man, whose power was continually on the increase, to what a point might he not at last be irritated? When the sun shone brightly, my courage returned; but when the sky was covered with clouds, travelling terrified me, and I discovered in myself a taste for indolent pursuits, foreign to my nature, but which fear had given birth to; physical happiness appeared to me then greater than I had previously regarded it, and every sort of exertion alarmed me. My health also, cruelly affected by so many troubles, weakened the energy of my character, so that during this period I put the patience of my friends to a most severe test, by an eternal discussion of the plans in deliberation, and overwhelming them with my uncertainties. I tried a second time to obtain a passport for America; they made me wait till the middle of winter before they gave me the answer I required, which terminated in a refusal. I then offered to enter into an engagement never to print any thing upon any subject, not even a bouquet to Iris, provided I was allowed to live at Rome; I had the vanity to remind them that it was the author of Corinna who asked permission to go and live in Italy. Doubtless the minister of police had never found a similar motive inscribed upon his registers, and the air of the south, which was so necessary to my health, was mercilessly refused me. They never ceased declaring to me that my whole life should be spent in the circle of two leagues, which separates Coppet from Geneva. If I remained, I must separate myself from my sons, who were of an age to seek a profession; and if my daughter shared my fortune, I imposed upon her the most melancholy perspective. The city of Geneva, which has preserved such noble traces of liberty, was, notwithstanding, gradually allowing herself to be gained over by the interests which connected her with the distributors of places in France. Every day the number of persons with whom I could be in intelligence diminished; and all my feelings became a weight upon my soul, in place of being a source of life. There was an end of my talents, of my happiness, of my existence, for it is frightful to be of no service to one's children, and to be the cause of injuring one's friends. Finally, the news I received, announced to me from all quarters the formidable preparations of the emperor: it was evident that he wished first to make himself master of the ports of the Baltic by the destruction of Russia, and that afterwards he reckoned on making use of the wrecks of that power to lead them against Constantinople: and his subsequent intention was to make that the point of starting for the conquest of Asia and Africa. A short time before he left Paris, he had said, "I am tired of this old Europe." And in truth she is no longer sufficient for the activity of her master. The last outlets of the Continent might be closed from one moment to another, and I was about to find myself in Europe as in a garrisoned town, where all the gates are guarded by military. I determined therefore on going off, while there yet remained one means of getting to England, and that means the tour of the whole of Europe. I fixed the 15th of May for my departure, the preparations for which had been arranged long before-hand in the most profound secrecy. On the eve of that day, my strength abandoned me entirely, and for a moment I almost persuaded myself that such a degree of terror as I felt could only proceed from the consciousness of meditating a bad action. Sometimes I consulted all sort of presages in the most foolish manner; at others, which was much wiser, I interrogated my friends and myself on the morality of my resolution. It appears to me that the part of resignation in all things may be the most religious, and I am not surprised that pious men should have gone so far as to feel a sort of scruple about resolutions proceeding from free will. Necessity appears to bear a sort of divine character, while man's resolution may be connected with his pride. It is certain, however, that none of our faculties have been given us in vain, and that of deciding for one's self has also its use. On another side, all persons of mediocre intellect are continually astonished that talent has different desires from theirs. When it is successful, all the world might do the same; but when it is productive of trouble, when it excites to stepping out of the common track, these same people regard it no longer but as a disease, and almost as a crime. I heard continually buzzing about me the commonplaces with which the world suffers itself to be led: "Has not she plenty of money? Can she not live well and sleep well in a good house?" Some persons of a higher cast felt that I had not even the certainty of my sad situation, and that it might get worse, without ever getting better. But the atmosphere which surrounded me counselled repose, because, for the last six months I had not been assailed by any new persecution, and because men always believe that what is, is what will be. It was in the midst of all these dispiriting circumstances that I was called upon to take one of the strongest resolutions which can occur in the private life of a female. My servants, with the exception of two confidential persons, were entirely ignorant of my secret; the greatest part of those who visited me had not the least idea of it, and by a single action, I was going to make an entire change in my own life and that of my family. Torn to pieces by uncertainty, I wandered over the park of Coppet; I seated myself in all the places where my father had been accustomed to repose himself and contemplate nature; I regarded once more these same beauties of water and verdure which we had so often admired together. I bid them adieu, and recommended myself to their sweet influence. The monument which encloses the ashes of my father and my mother, and in which, if the good God permits, mine also will be deposited, was one of the principal causes of the regret I felt at banishing myself from the place of my residence; but I found almost always on approaching it, a sort of strength which appeared to me to come from on high. I passed an hour in prayer before that iron gate which inclosed the mortal remains of the noblest of human beings, and there, my soul was convinced of the necessity of departure. I recalled the famous verses of Claudian*, in which he expresses the kind of doubt which arises in the most religious minds when they see the earth abandoned to the wicked, and the destiny of mortals as it were floating at the mercy of chance. I felt that I had no longer the strength necessary to feed the enthusiasm which developed in me whatever good qualities I possessed, and that I must listen to the voice of those of similar sentiments with myself, for the purpose of strengthening my confidence in my own resources, and preserving that self-respect which my father had instilled into me. In this state of anxiety, I invoked several times the memory of my father, of that man, the Fenelon of politics, whose genius was in every thing opposed to that of Bonaparte; and genius he certainly had, for it requires at least as much of that to put one's self in harmony with heaven, as to invoke to one's aid all the instruments which are let loose by the absence of laws divine and human. I went once more to look at my father's study, where his easy chair, his table, and his papers, still remained in their old situation; I embraced each venerated mark, I took his cloak which till then I had ordered to be left upon his chair, and carried it away with me, that I might wrap myself in it, if the messenger of death approached me. When these adieus were terminated, I avoided as much as I could any other leave-takings, which affected me too much, and wrote to the friends whom I quitted, taking care that my letters should not reach them until several days after my departure. * Saepe mihi dubiam traxitisententia mentem, Curarent Superi terras, an nullus inesset Rector, et incerto fluerent mortalia casu. Abstulit hunc tandem Rufini poena tumultum, Absolvitque Deos. Jam non ad culmina rerum Injustos crevisse queror; tolluntur in altum Ut lapsu graviore raent. The next day, Saturday the 23rd of May, 1812, at two o'clock in the afternoon, I got into my carriage, saying that I should return to dinner. I took no packet whatever with me; I had my fan in my hand, and my daughter hers; only my son and Mr. Rocca carried in their pockets what was necessary for some days journey. In descending the avenue of Coppet, in thus quitting that chateau which had become to me like an old and valued friend, I was ready to faint: my son took my hand, and said, "My dear mother, think that you are setting out for England*." That word revived my spirits: I was still, however, at nearly two thousand leagues distance from that goal, to which the usual road would have so speedily conducted me: but every step brought me at least something nearer to it. When I had proceeded a few leagues, I sent back one of my servants to apprize my establishment that I should not return until the next day, and I continued travelling night and day as far as a farmhouse beyond Berne, where I had fixed to meet Mr. Schlegel, who was so good as to offer to accompany me; there also I had to leave my eldest son, who had been educated, up to the age of fourteen, by the example of my father, whose features he reminds one of. A second time all my courage abandoned me; that Switzerland, still so tranquil and always so beautiful, her inhabitants, who know how to be free by their virtues, even though they have lost their political independence: the whole country detained me: it seemed to tell me not to quit it. It was still time to return: I had not yet made an irreparable step. Although the prefect had thought proper to interdict me from travelling in Switzerland, I saw clearly that it was only from the fear of my going beyond it. Finally, I had not yet crossed the barrier which left me no possibility of returning; the imagination feels a difficulty in supporting this idea. On the other hand, there was also something irreparable in the resolution of remaining; for after that moment, I felt, and the event has proved the feeling correct, that I could no longer escape. Besides, there is an indescribable sort of shame in recommencing such solemn farewells, and one can scarcely resuscitate for one's friends more than once. I know not what would have become of me, if this uncertainty, even at the very moment of action, had lasted much longer; for my head was quite confused with it. My children decided me, and especially my daughter, then scarcely fourteen years old. I committed myself, in a manner, to her, as if the voice of God had made itself be heard by the mouth of a child*. * England was then the hope of all who suffered for the cause of liberty; how comes it, that after the victory, her ministers have so cruelly deceived the expectation of Europe? (Note by the Editor.) My son took his leave, and after he was out of my sight, I could say, like Lord Russel: the bitterness of death is past. I got into my carriage with my daughter: uncertainty once terminated, I collected all my strength within myself, and I found sufficient of that for action which had altogether failed me for deliberation. Note by the Editor: * It was but a trifle to have succeeded in quitting Coppet, by deceiving* the vigilance of the prefect of Geneva; it was also necessary to obtain passports for the purpose of going through Austria, and that these passports should be under a name which would attract no attention from the different polices which then divided Germany. My mother entrusted me with this commission, and the emotion which I experienced from it will never cease to be present to my thoughts. It was undoubtedly a decisive step; if the passports were refused, my mother sunk again into a much more cruel situation; her plans were known; flight was thenceforward become impracticable, and the rigors of her exile would have every day been more intolerable. I thought I could not do better than to address myself directly to the Austrian minister, with that confidence in the feelings of his equals which is the first movement of every honest man. M. de Schraut made no hesitation in granting me the so much desired passports, and I hope he will allow me to express in this place the gratitude which I still retain to him for them. At a period when Europe was still bending under the yoke of Napoleon, during which the persecution directed against my mother estranged from her persons who probably owed to her courageous friendship the preservation of their fortunes, or their lives, I was not surprised, but I was most sensibly affected by the generous proceeding of the Austrian minister. I left my mother to return to Coppet, to which the interests of her fortune recalled me; and some days afterwards, my brother, of whom a cruel death has deprived us almost at the moment of entrance into his career set off to rejoin my mother at Vienna with her servants and travelling carriage. It was only this second departure which gave the hint to the police of the prefect of the Leman: so true it is, that to the other qualities of espionnage we must still add stupidity. Fortunately my mother was already far beyond the reach of the gendarmes, and she could continue the journey of which the narrative follows. (En of Note by the Editor). CHAPTER 6. Passage through Austria;--1812. In this manner, after ten years of continually increasing persecutions, first sent away from Paris, then banished into Switzerland, afterwards confined to my own chateau, and at last condemned to the dreadful punishment of never seeing my friends, and of being the cause of their banishment: in this manner was I obliged to quit, as a fugitive, two countries, France and Switzerland, by order of a man less French than myself: for I was born on the borders of that Seine where his tyranny alone naturalizes him. The air of this fine country is not a native air to him: can he then comprehend the pain of being banished from it, he who considers this fertile country only as the instrument of his victories? Where is his country? it is the earth which is subject to him. His fellow citizens? they are the slaves who obey his orders. He complained one day of not having had under his command, like Tamerlane, nations to whom reasoning was unknown. I imagine that by this time he is satisfied with Europeans: their manners, like their armies, now bear a sufficient resemblance to those of Tartars. I had nothing to fear in Switzerland, as I could always prove that I had a right to be there; but to leave it, I had only a foreign passport: I must go through one of the confederated states, and if any French agent had required the government of Bavaria to hinder me from passing, who does not know with what regret, but at the same time, with what obedience it would have executed the orders thus received? I entered into the Tyrol with a great respect for that country, which had fought from attachment to its ancient masters, but with a great contempt for such of the Austrian ministers as had advised the abandonment of men compromised by their attachment to their sovereign. It is said that a subaltern diplomatist, head of the spy department in Austria, thought proper one day, during the war, to maintain at the emperor's table, that the Tyrolese should be abandoned: M. de H., a gentleman of the Tyrol, counsellor of state in the Austrian service, who in his actions and writings has exhibited the courage of a warrior, and the talents of an historian, replied to these unworthy observations with the contempt they deserved: the emperor signified his entire approbation to M. de H., and showed by that at least that his private feelings were strangers to the political conduct which he was made to adopt. Thus it is that the greater part of the European sovereigns, at the moment of Bonaparte making himself master of France, who were extremely upright persons as individuals, were already become mere cyphers as kings, as the government of their states was entirely committed to circumstances and to their ministers. The aspect of the Tyrol reminds one of Switzerland: there is not, however, so much vigour and originality in the landscape, nor have the villages the same appearance of plenty; it is in short a fine country, which has been wisely governed, but never been free; and it is only as a mountaineer people, that it has shown itself capable of resistance. Very few instances of remarkable men can be mentioned from the Tyrol: first, the Austrian government is scarcely fit to develope genius; and, besides, the Tyrol, by its manners as well as by its geographical position, should have formed a part of the Swiss confederation: its incorporation with the Austrian monarchy not being conformable to its nature, it has only developed by that union the noble qualities of mountaineers, courage and fidelity. The postilion who drove us showed us a rock on which the emperor Maximilian, grandfather of Charles the Fifth, had nearly perished: the ardor of the chace had stimulated him to such a degree, that he had followed the chamois to heights from which it was impossible to descend. This tradition is still popular in the country, so necessary to nations is the admiration of the past. The memory of the last war was still quite alive in the bosoms of the people; the peasants showed us the summits of mountains on which they had entrenched themselves: their imagination delighted in retracing the effect of their fine warlike music, when it echoed from the tops of the hills into the vallies. When we were shown the palace of the prince-royal of Bavaria, at Inspruck, they told us that Hofer, the courageous peasant and head of the insurrection, had lived there; they gave us an instance of the intrepidity shown by a female, when the French entered into her chateau: in short, every thing displayed in them the desire of being a nation, much more than personal attachment to the house of Austria. In one of the churches at Inspruck is the famous tomb of Maximilian. I went to see it, flattering myself with the certainty of not being recognized by any person, in a place remote from the capitals where the French agents reside. The figure of Maximilian in bronze, is kneeling upon a sarcophagus, in the body of the church, and thirty statues of the same metal ranged on each side of the sanctuary represent the relations and ancestors of the emperor. So much past grandeur, so much of the ambition formidable in its day, collected in a family meeting round a tomb, formed a spectacle which led one to profound reflection: there you saw Philip the Good, Charles the Rash, and Mary of Bergundy; and in the midst of these historical personages Dietrich of Berne, a fabulous hero: the closed visor concealed the countenances of the knights, but when this visor was lifted up a brazen countenance appeared under a helmet of brass, and the features of the knight were of bronze, like his armour. The visor of Dietrich of Berne is the only one which cannot be lifted up, the artist meaning in that manner to signify the mysterious veil which covers the history of this warrior, From Inspruck I had to pass by Saltzburg, from thence to reach the Austrian frontiers. It seemed as if all my anxieties would be at an end, when I was once entered on the territory of that monarchy which I had known so secure and so good. But the moment which I most dreaded was the passage from Bavaria to Austria, for it was there that a courier might have preceded me, to forbid my being allowed to pass. In spite of this apprehension, I had not been very expeditious, for my health, which had been seriously injured by all I had suffered, did not allow me to travel by night. I have often felt, during this journey, that the greatest terror cannot overcome a sort of physical depression, which makes one dread fatigue more than death. I flattered myself, however, with arriving without any obstacle, and already my fear was dissipated on approaching the object which I thought secured, when on our entrance into the inn at Saltzburg, a man came up to Mr. Schlegel who accompanied me, and told him in German, that a French courier had been to inquire after a carriage coming from Inspruck with a lady and a young girl, and that he had left word he would return to get intelligence of them. I lost not a word of what the innkeeper mentioned, and became pale with terror. Mr. Schlegel also was alarmed on my account: he made some farther inquiries, all of which made it certain, that this was a French courier, that he came from Munich, that he had been as far as the Austrian frontier to wait for me, and not finding me there, that he had returned to meet me. Nothing appeared more clear: this was just what I had dreaded before my departure, and during the journey. It was impossible for me now to escape, as this courier, who it was said was already at the post-house, would necessarily overtake me. I determined on the spur of the moment to leave my carriage, my daughter, and Mr. Schlegel at the inn, and to go alone and on foot into the streets of the town, and take the chance' of entering the first house whose master or mistress had a physiognomy that pleased me. I would obtain of them an asylum for a few days; during this time, my daughter and Mr. Schlegel might say that they were going to rejoin me in Austria, and I should leave Salzburg afterwards in the disguise of a country woman. Hazardous in the extreme as this resource appeared, no other remained to me, and I was preparing for the task, in fear and trembling, when who should enter my apartment but this so much dreaded courier, who was no other than Mr. Rocca. After having accompanied me the first day of my journey, he returned to Geneva to terminate some business, and now came to rejoin me; he had passed himself off as a French courier, in order to take advantage of the terror which the name inspires, particularly to the allies of France, and to obtain horses more quickly. He had taken the Munich road, and had hurried on as far as the Austrian frontier, to make himself sure that no one had preceded or announced me. He returned to meet me, to tell me that I had nothing to fear, and to get upon the box of my carriage as we passed that frontier, which appeared to me the most dreadful, but also the last of my dangers. In this manner my cruel apprehension was changed into a most pleasing sentiment of gratefulness and security. We walked about the town of Salzburg, which contains many noble edifices, but like the greater part of the ecclesiastical principalities of Germany, now presents a most dreary aspect. The tranquil resources of that kind of government have terminated with it. The convents also were preservers; one is struck with the number of establishments and edifices which have been erected by bachelor masters in their residence: all these peaceable sovereigns have benefited their people. An archbishop of Salzburg in the last century has cut a road which is prolonged for several hundred paces under a mountain, like the grotto of Pausilippo at Naples: on the front of the entrance gate there is a bust of the archbishop, under which is an inscription: Tesaxa loquuntur. (The stones speak of thee). There is a degree of grandeur in this inscription. I entered at last into that Austria, which four years before I had seen so happy; already I was struck by a sensible change, produced by the depreciation of paper-money, and the variations of every kind which the uncertainty of the financial measures had introduced into its value. Nothing demoralizes a people so much as these continual fluctuations which make every man a broker, and hold out to the working classes a means of getting money by sharping, instead of by their labour. I no longer found in the people the same probity which had struck me four years before: this paper-money sets the imagination at work with the hope of rapid and easy gains; and the hazardous chances overturn the gradual and certain existence which is the basis of the honesty of the middling classes. During my residence in Austria, a man was hanged for forging notes at the very moment when the government had reduced the value of the old ones; he called out, on his way to execution that it was not he who had robbed, but the state. And, in truth, it is impossible to make the common people comprehend that it is just to punish them for having speculated in their own affairs, in the same way as the government had done in its own. But this government was the ally of the French government, and doubly its ally, as its monarch was the very patient father-in-law of a very terrible son-in-law. What resources therefore could remain to him? The marriage of his daughter had been the means of liberating him from two millions of contributions-at most; the rest had been required with the kind of justice of which the other is so easily capable, and which consists in treating his friends and his enemies alike: from this proceeded the penury of the treasury. Another misfortune also resulted from the last war, and especially from the last peace: the inutility of the generous feeling which had illustrated the Austrian arms in the battles of Essling and Wagram, had cooled the national attachment to the sovereign, which had formerly been very strong. The same thing has happened to all the sovereigns who have treated with the emperor Napoleon; he has made use of them as receivers to levy imposts on his account; he has forced them to squeeze their subjects to pay him the taxes he demanded; and when it has suited him to dethrone these sovereigns, the people, previously alienated from them by the very wrongs they had committed in obedience to the emperor, have not raised an arm to defend them against him. The emperor Napoleon has the art of making countries said to be at peace, so singularly miserable that any change is agreeable to them, and having been once compelled to give men and money to France, they scarcely feel the inconvenience of being wholly united to it. They are wrong, however, for any thing is better than to lose the name of a nation, and as the miseries of Europe are caused by one man, care should be taken to preserve what may be restored when he is no more. Before I reached Vienna, as I waited for my second son, who was to rejoin me with my servants and baggage, I stopped a day at Molk, that celebrated abbey, placed upon an eminence, from which Napoleon had contemplated the various windings of the Danube, and praised the beauty of the country upon which he was going to pounce with his armies. He frequently amuses himself in this manner in making poetical pieces on the beauties of nature, which he is about to ravage, and upon the effects of war, with which he is going to overwhelm mankind. After all, he is in the right to amuse himself in all ways, at the expense of the human race, which tolerates his existence. Man is only arrested in the career of evil by obstacles or remorse; no one has yet opposed to Napoleon the one, and he has very easily rid himself of the other. For me, who, solitary, followed his footsteps on the terrace from which the country could be seen to a great distance, I admired its fertility, and felt astonished at seeing how soon the bounty of heaven repairs the disasters occasioned by man. It is only moral riches which disappear altogether, or are at least lost for centuries. CHAPTER 7. Residence at Vienna. I arrived at Vienna on the 6th of June, very fortunately just two hours before the departure of a courier whom Count Stackelberg, the Russian ambassador, was dispatching to Wilna, where the emperor Alexander then was. M. de Stackelberg, who behaved to me with that noble delicacy which is so prominent a trait in his character, wrote by this courier for my passport, and assured me that within three weeks I might reckon on having an answer. It then became a question where I was to pass these three weeks; my Austrian friends, who had given me the most amiable reception, assured me that I might remain at Vienna without the least fear. The court was then at Dresden, at the great meeting of all the German princes, who came to present their homage to the emperor of France. Napoleon had stopped at Dresden under the pretext of still negociating there to avoid the war with Russia, in other words, to obtain by his policy the same result as he could by his arms. He would not at first admit the king of Prussia to his banquet at Dresden; he knew too well what repugnance the heart of that unfortunate monarch must have to what he conceives himself obliged to do. It is said that M. de Metternich obtained this humiliating favor for him. M. de Hardenberg, who accompanied him, made the remark to the emperor Napoleon, that Prussia had paid one third more than the promised contributions. The emperor turning his back to him, replied: "An apothecary's bill,"-- for he has a secret pleasure in making use of vulgar expressions, the more to humble those who are the objects of it. He assumed a sufficient degree of coquetry in his way of living with the emperor and empress of Austria as it was of importance to him that the Austrian government should take an active part in his war with Russia. In a conversation with M. de Metternich, I have been assured that he said, "You see very well that I can never have the least interest in diminishing the power of Austria, as it now exists; for, first of all, it suits me that my father-in-law should be a prince of great consideration: besides, I have more confidence in the old than in the new dynasties. Has not General Bernadotte already taken the side of making peace with England?" And in fact, the Prince Royal of Sweden, as will be seen in the sequel, had courageously declared himself for the interests of the country which he governed. The emperor of France having left Dresden to review his armies, the empress went to spend some time at Prague with her own family. Napoleon himself, at his departure, regulated the etiquette that was to subsist between the father and the daughter, and one may conjecture that it was not very easy, as he loves etiquette almost as much from suspicion as from vanity, in other words, as a means of isolating individuals among themselves, under the pretence of marking the distinction of their ranks. The first ten days, which I passed at Vienna, passed unclouded, and I was delighted at thus finding myself again in a pleasing society, whose manner of thinking corresponded with my own; for the public opinion was unfavorable to the alliance with Napoleon, and the government had concluded it without being supported by the national assent. In fact, how could a war, the ostensible object of which was the re-establishment of Poland, be undertaken by the power which had contributed to the partition, and which still retained in its hands with greater obstinacy than ever the third of that same Poland? Thirty thousand men were sent by the Austrian government to restore the confederation of Poland at Warsaw, and nearly as many spies were attached to the movements of the Poles in Gallicia, who wished to have deputies at this confederation. The Austrian government was therefore obliged to speak against the Poles, at the very time that it was acting in their cause, and to say to her subjects of Gallicia: "I forbid you to be of the opinion which I support." What metaphysics! they would be found very intricate, if fear did not explain every thing. The Poles are the only nation, of those which Bonaparte drags after him, that create any interest. I believe they know as well as we do, that they are only the pretence for the war, and that the emperor does not care a fig for their independence. He has not even been able to refrain from expressing several times to the emperor Alexander his disdain for Poland, solely because she wishes to be free: but it suits his purposes to put her in the van against Russia, and the Poles avail themselves of that circumstance to restore their national independence. I know not if they will succeed, for it is with difficulty that despotism ever gives liberty, and what they will regain in their own cause, if successful, they will lose in the cause of Europe. They will be Poles, but Poles as much enslaved as the three nations upon whom they will no longer depend. Be that as it may, the Poles are the only Europeans who can serve under the banners of Napoleon without blushing. The princes of the Rhenish Confederation think to find their interest in it by the loss of their honor; but Austria by a combination truly remarkable, at once sacrifices in it both her honor and her interest. The emperor Napoleon wished the archduke Charles to take the command of these thirty thousand men; but the archduke fortunately saved himself from this insult; and when I saw him walking alone in a brown coat, in the alleys of the Prater, I recovered all my old respect for him. The same subaltern diplomatist who had so unworthily advised the abandonment of the Tyrolese, was entrusted, during the absence of Prince Metternich from Vienna, with the police of foreigners, and he acquitted himself as you shall see. The first few days he allowed me to remain undisturbed; I had formerly passed a winter at Vienna, and been very well received by the emperor and empress, and by the whole court: it was, therefore, rather awkward to tell me that this time I would not be received, because I was in disgrace with the emperor Napoleon; particularly as this disgrace was partly occasioned by the praises which I had bestowed in my book on the morality and literary genius of the Germans. But what was much more awkward was to run the risk of giving the least umbrage to a power, to which it must be confessed, they might very well sacrifice me, after all they had already done for it. I suppose, therefore, that after I had been some days at Vienna, the chief of the police received some more exact information of the nature of my situation with Bonaparte, and in consequence thought it necessary to watch me; and this was his method of inspection. He placed spies at my gate in the street, who followed me on foot, when my carriage drove slowly, and got into cabriolets in order not to lose sight of me, when I took an airing into the country. This method of exercising the police appeared to me to unite both the French machiavelism, and German clumsiness. The Austrians have persuaded themselves that they have been beat, because they had not so much wit as the French, and that the wit of the French consists in their police system; in consequence they have set about making a methodical espionage, organizing that ostensibly which should it all events be concealed; and although destined by nature to be very honest people, they have made it a kind of duty to imitate a state which unites the extremes of jacobinism and despotism. I could not help, however, being uneasy at this espionnage, when the least common sense was sufficient to see that flight was now my only object. They tried to alarm me about the arrival of my Russian passport; they pretended that I might have to wait several months for it and that then the war would prevent me from passing. It was easy for me to judge that I could not remain at Vienna after the French ambassador returned to it; what would then become of me? I intreated M. de Stackelberg to give me some means of passing by Odessa, to repair to Constantinople. But Odessa being Russian, a passport from Petersburg was equally necessary to go there; there therefore remained no road open but the direct one to Turkey through Hungary; and this road passing on the borders of Servia was subject to a thousand dangers. I might still reach the port of Salonica by going across the interior of Greece; the archduke Francis had taken this road to get into Sardinia; but the archduke Francis is a good horseman, and of that I was scarcely capable: still less could I think of exposing so young a person as my daughter to such a journey. I was obliged, therefore, although the idea was most painful to me, to determine on parting with her, and sending her by the way of Denmark and Sweden in the charge of persons in whom I could confide. I concluded at all hazards an agreement with an Armenian to take me to Constantinople. From thence I proposed to pass by Greece, Sicily, Cadiz, and Lisbon, and however hazardous was this voyage, it offered a fine perspective to the imagination. I addressed the office for foreign affairs, directed by a subaltern during the absence of M. de Metternich, for a passport which would enable me to leave Austria by Hungary, or by Gallicia, according as I might go to Petersberg or to Constantinople. I was told that I must make my election; that they could not give me a passport to go by two different frontiers, and that even to go to Presburg, which is the first city of Hungary, only six leagues from Vienna, it was necessary to have an authority from the committee of the States. Certainly I could not help thinking that Europe, which was formerly so open to all travellers, is become, under the influence of the emperor Napoleon, like a great net, in which you get entangled at every step. How many restraints and shackles there are upon the slightest movements! And can it be conceived that the unhappy governments which France oppresses, console themselves for it by making the miserable remains of power which has been left them, fall heavy in a thousand ways upon their subjects! CHAPTER 8. Departure from Vienna. Obliged to make my election, I decided at last for Gallicia, which would conduct me to the country I preferred, namely, to Russia. I flattered myself, that once at a distance from Vienna, all these vexations, excited no doubt by the French government, would cease; and that at all events, I might, if it was necessary, quit Gallicia, and regain Bucharest by Transylvania. The geography of Europe, such as Napoleon has constituted it, is but too well learned by misfortune; the turnings which I was obliged to take to avoid his power were already near two thousand leagues; and now at my departure even from Vienna I was constrained to borrow the Asiatic territory to escape from it. I departed, therefore, without having received my Russian passport, hoping thereby to quiet the uneasiness which the subaltern police of Vienna appeared to feel about the presence of a female who was in disgrace with the emperor Napoleon. I requested one of my friends to rejoin me, by travelling night and day, as soon as the answer from Russia arrived, and I proceeded on my road. I did very wrong in taking this step, for at Vienna I was protected by my friends and by public opinion; I could there easily address myself to the emperor or to his prime minister: but once confined to a provincial town, I had only to do with the stupid wickedness of a subaltern, who wished to make a merit with the French government, of his conduct towards me; this was the method he took. I stopped for some days at Brunn, the capital of Moravia, where an English colonel, a Mr. Mills, was detained in exile; he was a man of the most perfect goodness and obliging manners, and according to the English expression, altogether inoffensive. He was made dreadfully miserable, without the least pretence or utility. But the Austrian ministry is apparently persuaded that it will derive an air of strength from turning persecutor; its counsellors are not mistaken; and as was said by a man of wit, their manner of governing in matters of police, resembles the sentinels placed upon the half destroyed citadel of Brunn,--they keep a strict guard round the ruins. Scarcely had I arrived at Brunn when all sorts of difficulties were started about my passports, and those of my companions. I asked permission to send my son to Vienna, to give the necessary explanations upon these points. I was told that neither myself nor my son would be allowed to go one league backwards. I know not if the emperor, or M. de Metternich were informed of all these absurd acts, but I encountered at Brunn, in the agents of government, a dread of compromising themselves which appeared to me quite worthy of the present French regime; and it must even be admitted that when the French are afraid, they are more excusable, for under the emperor Napoleon they run the risk of exile, imprisonment, or death. The governor of Moravia, a man in other respects very estimable, informed me that I was ordered to go through Gallicia as quickly as possible, and that I was forbid stopping more than twenty-four hours at Lanzut, where I had the intention of going. Lanzut is the estate of the princess Lubomirska, the sister of prince Adam Czartorinski, marshal of the Polish Confederation, which the Austrian troops were going to support. The princess Lubomirska was herself generally respected from her personal character, and the liberal use which she made of her splendid fortune; besides, her attachment to the house of Austria was conspicuous, and although a Pole by birth, she had never participated in the spirit of opposition which has always been exhibited in Poland to the Austrian government. Her nephew and niece, Prince Henry and the princess Theresa, with whom I had the honor to be intimate, are both of them endowed with the most brilliant and amiable qualities; they might no doubt be supposed to entertain a strong attachment to their Polish country, but it was then rather difficult to make a crime of this opinion, when the prince of Schwarzenberg was sent at the head of thirty thousand men to fight for the restoration of Poland. To what miserable shifts are those princes reduced, who are constantly told that they must yield to circumstances? it is proposing to them to govern with every wind. The successes of Bonaparte excite the envy of the greater part of the governors of Germany; they persuade themselves that they were beat because they were too honest, whereas it was because they had not been honest enough. If the Germans had imitated the Spaniards, if they had said:--whatever be the consequences, we will not bear a foreign yoke: they would still be a nation, and their princes would not be dangling, I do not say in the anti-chambers of the emperor Napoleon, but in those of all the persons on whom a ray of his favor is fallen. The emperor of Austria and his intelligent companion certainly preserve as much dignity as they can in their situation; but this situation is so artificial in itself, that it is impossible to give lustre to it. None of the actions of the Austrian government in favor of French interests can be attributed to any thing but fear; and this new muse inspires very sorrowful strains. I tried to represent to the governor of Moravia, that if I was thus hurried with so much politeness towards the frontier, I knew not what would become of me, having no Russian passport, and that I should be obliged, from inability to go either forward or backward, to pass my life at Brody, a frontier town between Russia and Austria, inhabited by Jews, who have settled there to carry on the trade of carrying from the one empire to the other. "What you say is very true," replied the governor, "but here is my order." For some time past governments have found the art of inculcating that a civil agent is subject to the same discipline as a military officer; with the latter reflection is altogether forbidden, or at least rarely finds a place; but one would have some difficulty in making men responsible in the eye of the law, such as are all the magistrates of England, comprehend, that they are not allowed to have an opinion upon the order that is given them. And what is the consequence of this servile obedience? If it had only the head of the state for its object, it might still be considered proper in an absolute monarchy; but during the absence of that head, or his representative, a subaltern may abuse at his pleasure those measures of police, the infernal inventions of arbitrary governments, and of which real greatness will never make use. I departed for Gallicia, and this time, I confess, I was completely depressed; the phantom of tyranny followed me every where; I saw those Germans, whom I had known so upright, depraved by the fatal marriage, which seemed to have even altered the blood of the subjects, as it had done that of their sovereign. I thought that Europe existed only beyond the seas, or the Pyrenees, and I despaired of reaching an asylum to my inclination. The spectacle of Gallicia was not of a kind to revive any hopes of the destiny of the human race. The Austrians have not acquired the art of making themselves beloved by the foreign nations which are subject to them. During the period they were in possession of Venice, the first thing they did was to put down the Carnival, which had become in a manner an institution, so long a time had elapsed since the Venetian carnival was talked of. The rudest people of the monarchy were selected to govern that gay city; no wonder therefore that the nations of the south should almost prefer being pillaged by the French to being governed by the Austrians. The Poles love their country as an unfortunate friend: the country is dull and monotonous, the people ignorant and lazy; they have always wished for liberty; they have never known how to acquire it. But the Poles think that they can and may govern Poland, and the feeling is very natural. The education however of the people is so much neglected, and all kind of industry is so foreign to them, that the Jews have possessed themselves of the entire trade, and make the peasants sell them for a quantity of brandy the whole harvest of the approaching year. The distance between the nobility and the peasantry is so immense, the contrast between the luxury of the one, and the frightful misery of the other is so shocking, that it is probable the Austrians have given them better laws than those which previously existed. But a proud people, and the Poles are so even in their misery, does not wish to be humbled, even when they are benefited, and in that point the Austrians have never failed. They have divided Gallicia into circles, each of which is commanded by a German functionary; sometimes a person of distinction accepts this employment, but it is much more frequently a kind of brute, taken from the subaltern ranks, and who in virtue of his office commands in the most despotic manner the greatest noblemen of Poland. The police, which in the present times has replaced the secret tribunal, authorizes the most oppressive measures. Now let us only imagine what the police can be, namely, the most subtle and arbitrary power in the government, entrusted to the rude hands of the captain of a circle. At every post-house in Gallicia there are to be seen three descriptions of persons who gather round travellers' carriages: the Jew traders, the Polish beggars, and the German spies. The country appears exclusively inhabited by these three classes of men. The beggars, with their long beards and ancient Sarmatian costume, excite deep commiseration; it is very true that if they would work they need not be in that state; but I know not whether it is pride or laziness which makes them disdain the culture of the enslaved earth. You meet upon the high roads processions of men and women carrying the standard of the cross, and singing Psalms; a profound expression of melancholy reigns upon their countenance: I have seen them, when not money, but food of a better sort than they had been accustomed to was given them, turn up their eyes to heaven with astonishment, as if they considered themselves unfit to enjoy its bounty. The custom of the common people in Poland is to embrace the knees of the nobility when they meet them; you cannot stir a step in a village without having the women, children, and old men saluting you in this manner. In the midst of this spectacle of wretchedness you might see some men in shabby attire, who were spies upon misery: for that was the only object which could offer itself to their eyes. The captains of the circles refused passports to the Polish noblemen, for fear they should see one another, or lest they should go to Warsaw. They obliged these noblemen to appear before them every eight days, in order to certify their presence. The Austrians thus proclaimed in all manner of ways that they knew they were detested in Poland, and they separated their troops into two equal divisions: the first entrusted with supporting externally the interests of Poland, and the second employed in the interior to prevent the Poles from aiding the same cause. I do not believe that any country was ever more wretchedly governed than Gallicia was at that time, at least under political considerations; and it was apparently to conceal this spectacle from general observation that so many difficulties were made in allowing a stranger to reside in, or even to pass through the country. I return to the manner in which the Austrian police behaved to me to hasten my journey. In this road it is necessary to have your passport examined by each captain of a circle; and every third post you found one of the chief towns of the circle. They had put up placards in the police offices of all these towns that a strict eye must be kept on me as I passed through. If it was not for the singular impertinence of treating a female in this manner, and that a female who had been persecuted for doing justice to Germany, one could not help laughing at the excess of stupidity which could publish in capital letters measures of police, the whole strength of which consists in their secrecy. It reminded me of M. de Sartines, who had formerly proposed to give spies a livery. It is not that the director of all these absurdities is, as some say, devoid of understanding: but he has such a strong desire to please the French government, that he even seeks to do himself honor by his meannesses, as publickly as possible. This proclaimed inspection was executed with as much ingenuity as it was conceived: a corporal, or a clerk, or perhaps both together, came to look at my carriage, smoking their pipes, and when they had gone the round of it, they went their way without even deigning to tell me if there was any thing the matter with it; if they had done that, they would have been at least good for something. I made very slow progress to wait for the Russian passport, now my only means of safety in the circumstances in which I was placed. One morning I turned out of my road to go and see a ruined castle, which belonged to the princess Lubomirska. To get to it, I had to go over roads, of which, without having travelled in Poland, it is impossible to form an idea. In the middle of a sort of desert which I was crossing alone with my son, a person on horseback saluted me in French; I wished to answer him, but he was already at a distance. I cannot express the effect which the sound of that dear language produced upon me, at a moment so cruel. Ah! if the French were but once free, how one would love them! they would then be the first themselves to despise their allies. I descended into the court yard of this castle, which was entirely in ruins. The keeper, with his wife and children, came to meet me, and embraced my knees. I caused them to be informed by a bad interpreter, that I knew the princess Lubomirska; that name was sufficient to inspire them with confidence; they had no doubt of the truth of what I said, although I travelled with a very shabby equipage. They introduced me into a sort of hall, which resembled a prison, and at the moment of my entrance, one of the women came into it to burn perfumes. They had neither white bread nor meat, but an exquisite Hungarian wine, and every where the wrecks of magnificence stood by the side of the greatest misery. This contrast is of frequent recurrence in Poland: there are no beds, even in houses fitted up with the most finished elegance. Every thing appears sketched in this country, and nothing terminated in it; but what one can never sufficiently praise is the goodness of the people, and the generosity of the great: both are easily excited by all that is good and beautiful, and the agents whom Austria sends there seem like wooden men in the midst of this flexible nation. At last my Russian passport arrived, and I shall be grateful for it to the end of my life, so great was the pleasure it gave me. My friends at Vienna had succeeded at the same time in dissipating the malignant influence of those who thought to please France by tormenting me. This time I flattered myself with being entirely sheltered from any farther trouble; but I forgot that the circular order to the captains of the circles to keep me under inspection, was not yet revoked, and that it was only direct from the ministry that I had the promise of having these ridiculous torments put an end to. I thought, however, that I might venture to follow my first plan, and stop at Lanzut, that castle of the princess Lubomirska, so famous in Poland for the union of the most perfect taste and magnificence. I anticipated extreme pleasure from again seeing prince Henry Lubomirska, whose society, as well as that of his amiable lady, had made me pass at Geneva many agreeable moments. I proposed to myself to remain there two days, and to continue my journey with great speed, as news came from all quarters that war was declared between France and Russia. I don't quite see what there was in this plan of mine so dreadful to the tranquillity of Austria; it was a most singular idea to be jealous of my connection with the Poles, because they served under Bonaparte. No doubt, and I repeat it, the Poles cannot be confounded with the other nations who are tributary to France: it is frightful to be obliged to hope for liberty only from a despot, and to expect the independence of one's own nation only from the slavery of the rest of Europe. But finally, in this Polish cause, the Austrian ministry was more to be suspected than I was, for it furnished troops to support it, while I only consecrated my poor forces to proclaim the justice of the cause of Europe, then defended by Russia. Besides, the Austrian ministry, in common with all the governments in alliance with Bonaparte, has no longer any knowledge of what constitutes opinion, conscience, or affection: the one single idea which they retain, the inconsistency of their own conduct and the art with which Napoleon's diplomacy has entangled them, is that of mere brute force; and to please that they do every thing. CHAPTER 9. Passage through Poland. I arrived in the beginning of July at the chief town of the circle, in which Lanzut is situated; my carriage stopped before the posthouse, and my son went, as usual, to have my passport examined. I was astonished, at the end of a quarter of an hour, not to see him return, and I requested M. Schlegel to go and ascertain the cause of his delay. They both came back immediately, followed by a man whose countenance I shall never, during my life, forget: an affected smile, upon the most stupid features, gave the most disagreeable expression to his countenance. My son, almost beside himself, informed me that the captain of the circle had declared to him that I could not remain more than eight hours at Lanzut, and that to secure my obedience to this order, one of his commissaries should follow me to the castle, should enter into it with me, and should not quit me until I had left it. My son had represented to this captain, that overcome as I was with fatigue, I required more than eight hours to repose myself, and that the sight of a commissary of police, in my weak state, might give me a very fatal shock. To all these representations the captain replied with a brutality which is quite peculiar to German subalterns; nowhere also do you meet with that obsequious respect for power which immediately succeeds to arrogance towards the weak. The mental movements of these men resemble the evolutions of a review day; they make a half turn to the right, and a half turn to the left, according to the word of command which is given to them. The commissary intrusted with the inspection of me, fatigued himself in bowing to the very ground, but would not in the least modify his charge. He got into a caleche, the horses of which followed me so close that they touched the hind wheels of my berline. The idea of entering, escorted in this manner, into the residence of an old friend, into a paradise of delight, where I had been feasting my ideas by anticipation, with spending several days; this idea I say made me so ill, that I could not get the better of it; joined to that also was, I believe, the irritation of finding at my heels this insolent spy, a very fit subject, certainly, to outwit, if I had had the desire, but who did his duty with an intolerable mixture of pedantry and rigor*: I was seized with a nervous attack in the middle of the road, and they were obliged to lift me out of my carriage, and lay me down on the side of the ditch. This wretched commissary fancied that this was an occasion to take compassion on me, and without getting out of his carriage himself, he sent his servant to find me a glass of water. I cannot express how angry I felt with myself for the weakness of my nerves; the compassion of this man was a last insult, which I would at least have wished to spare myself. He set off again at the same time that I did, and I made my entry, along with him, into the court yard of the castle of Lanzut. Prince Henry, not in the least suspecting any thing of the kind, came to meet me with the most amiable gaiety; he was at first frightened at the paleness of my looks, but when I told him, which I did immediately, what sort of guest I had brought with me, from that moment his coolness, firmness, and friendship for me did not belie themselves for a moment. But can one conceive a state of things in which a commissary of police should plant himself at the table of a great nobleman like prince Henry, or rather at that of any person whatever, without his consent? (Note of the Editor) * To explain how strong and well-founded was the anguish which my mother experienced at this point of her journey, I ought to mention that the attention of the Austrian police was not then confined to her only. The description of M. Rocca had been sent all along the road, with an order to arrest him in quality of his being a French officer; and although he had resigned his commission, and his wounds had incapacitated him from continuing his military service, there is no doubt, that if he had been delivered up to France, the forfeiture of his life would have been the consequence. He had therefore travelled alone, and under a borrowed name, and it was at Lanzut that he had given my mother the rendezvous. Having arrived there before her, and not in the least suspecting that she would be escorted by a commissary of police, he came out to meet her, full of joy and confidence. The danger to which he was thus, insensibly, exposing himself, transfixed my mother with terror, and she had barely time to give him a signal to return back; and had it not been for the generous presence of mind of a Polish gentleman, who supplied M. Rocca with the means of escaping, he would infallibly have been recognized and arrested by the commissary. Ignorant of what might be the fate of her manuscript, under what circumstances, public or private, she might ever publish it, my mother felt herself under the necessity of entirely suppressing these details, to which I am at present allowed to give publicity. (End of Note of the Editor.) After supper this commissary came up to my son, and said to him, with that coaxing tone of voice which I particularly dislike, when it is used to say cutting words, "I ought, according to my orders, to pass the night in your mother's apartment, in order to be certain that she has no communication with any one; but from regard to her, I will not do it." "You may add also," said my son, "from regard to yourself, for if you should dare to put your foot in my mother's apartment during the night, I will throw you out of the window." "Ah! Monsieur le Baron," replied the commissary, bowing lower than usual, because this threat had a false air of power which did not fail to affect him. He went to lay down, and the next day at breakfast, the prince's secretary managed him so well, by giving him plenty to eat and drink, that I might, I believe, have remained several hours longer, but I was ashamed at having been the occasion of such a scene in the house of my amiable host. I did not even allow myself time to examine those beautiful gardens, which remind us of the southern climate whose productions they offer, nor that house, which has been the asylum of persecuted French emigrants, and where the artists have sent the tribute of their talents in return for the services rendered them by the lady of the castle. The contrast between such delightful and striking impressions and the grief and indignation I felt, was intolerable; the recollection of Lanzut, which I have so many reasons for loving, even now makes me shudder, when I think of it. I took my departure then from this residence, shedding bitter tears, and not knowing what else was in store for me during the fifty leagues I had yet to travel in the Austrian territory. The commissary accompanied me to the borders of his circle, and when he took his leave, asked me if I was satisfied with him; the stupidity of the fellow quite disarmed my resentment. A peculiar feature in all this persecution, which formerly never entered into the character of the Austrian government, is, that it is executed by its agents with as much rudeness as awkwardness: these ci-devant honest people carry into the base commissions with which they are entrusted the same scrupulous exactness that they formerly did into the good ones, and their limited conception of this new method of government, which was not known to them, makes them commit a hundred blunders, either from want of skill or clumsiness. It is like taking the club of Hercules to kill a fly, and during this useless exertion the most important matters may escape them. On leaving the circle of Lanzut, I still found as far as Leopol, the capital of Gallicia, grenadiers placed from post to post to make sure of my progress. I should have felt regret at making these brave fellows thus lose their time, had it not been for the thought that they were much better there, than with the unfortunate army delivered by Austria to Napoleon. On arriving at Leopol, I found again ancient Austria in the governor and commandant of the province, who both received me with the greatest politeness, and gave me, what I wished above every thing, an order for passing from Austria into Russia. Such was the end of my residence in this monarchy, which I had formerly seen powerful, just and upright. Her alliance with Napoleon while it lasted, degraded her to the lowest rank among nations. History will doubtless not forget that she has shown herself very warlike in her long wars against France, and that her last effort to resist Bonaparte was inspired by a national enthusiasm worthy of all praise; but the sovereign of this country, by yielding to his counsellors rather than to his own character, has destroyed for ever that enthusiasm, by checking its ebullition. The unfortunate men who perished on the plains of Essling and Wagram, that there might still be an Austrian monarchy and a German people, could have hardly expected that their companions in arms would be fighting three years afterwards for the extension of Bonaparte's empire to the borders of Asia, and that there might not be in the whole of Europe, even a desert, where the objects of his proscription, from kings to subjects, might find an asylum; for such is the object, and the sole object, of the war excited by France against Russia. CHAPTER 10. Arrival in Russia. One had hardly been accustomed to consider Russia as the most free state in Europe; but such is the weight of the yoke which the Emperor of France has imposed upon all the Continental states, that on arriving at last in a country where his tyranny can no longer make itself felt, you fancy yourself in a republic. It was on the 14th of July that I made my entrance into Russia; this co-incidence with the anniversary of the first day of the Revolution particularly struck me; and thus closed for me the circle of the history of France which had commenced on the 14th of July 1789.* When the barrier which separates Austria from Russia was opened to let me pass, I made an oath never to set my foot in a country subjected in any degree to the emperor Napoleon. Will this oath ever allow me to revisit beautiful France? * (Note by the Editor) It was on the 14th of July, 1817, that my mother was taken from us, and received into the bosom of God. What mind is there that would not be affected with religious emotion on meditating on the mysterious co-incidences which the destiny of the human race presents! (End of Note by the Editor.) The first person who received me in Russia was a Frenchman, who had formerly been a clerk in my father's bureaux; he talked to me of him with tears in his eyes, and that name thus pronounced appeared to me of happy augury. In fact, in that Russian empire, so falsely termed barbarous, I have experienced none but noble and delightful impressions: may my gratitude draw down additional blessings on this people and their sovereign! I entered Russia at the moment when the French army had already penetrated a considerable distance into the Russian territory, and yet no restraint or vexation of any kind impeded for a moment the progress of a foreign traveller; neither I, nor my companions, knew a syllable of Russian; we only spoke French, the language of the enemies who were ravaging the empire: I had not even with me, by a succession of disagreeable chances, a single servant who could speak Russian, and had it not been for a German physician (Dr. Renner) who in the most handsome manner volunteered his services as our interpreter as far as Moscow, we should have justly merited the epithet of deaf and dumb, applied by the Russians to persons unacquainted with their language. Well! even in this state, our journey would have been quite safe and easy, so great is the hospitality of the nobles and the people of Russia! On our first entrance we learned that the direct road to Petersburg was already occupied by the armies, and that we must go to Moscow in order to get the means of conveyance there. This was another round of 200 leagues; but we had already made 1500, and I now feel pleased at having seen Moscow. The first province we had to cross, Volhynia, forms a part of Russian Poland; it is a fertile country, over-run with Jews, like Gallicia, but much less miserable. I stopped at the chateau of a Polish nobleman to whom I had been recommended, who advised me to hasten my journey, as the French were marching upon Volhynia, and might easily enter it in eight days. The Poles, in general, like the Russians much better than they do the Austrians; the Russians and Poles are both of Sclavonian origin: they have been enemies, but respect each other mutually, while the Germans, who are further advanced in European civilization than the Sclavonians, have not learned to do them justice in other respects. It was easy to see that the Poles in Volhynia were not at all afraid of the entrance of the French; but although their opinions were known, they were not in the least subjected to that petty persecution which only excites hatred without restraining it. The spectacle, however, of one nation subjected by another, is always a painful one;--centuries must elapse before the union is sufficiently established to make the names of victor and vanquished be forgotten. At Gitomir, the chief town of Volhynia, I was told that the Russian minister of police had been sent to Wilna, to learn the motive of the emperor Napoleon's aggression, and to make a formal protest against his entry into the Russian territory. One can hardly credit the numberless sacrifices made by the emperor Alexander, in order to preserve peace. And in fact, far from Napoleon having it in his power to accuse the emperor Alexander of violating the treaty of Tilsit, the latter might have been reproached with a too scrupulous fidelity to that fatal treaty; and it was rather he who had the right of declaring war against Napoleon, as having first violated it. The emperor of France in his conversation with M. Balasheff, the minister of police, gave himself up to those inconceivable indiscretions which might be taken for abandon, if we did not know that it suits him to increase the terror which he inspires by exhibiting himself as superior to all kinds of calculation. "Do you think," said he to M. Balasheff, "that I care a straw for these Polish jacobins?" And I have been really assured that there is in existence a letter, addressed several years since to M. de Romanzoff by one of Napoleon's ministers, in which it was proposed to strike out the name of Poland and the Poles from all European acts. How unfortunate for this nation that the emperor Alexander had not taken the title of king of Poland, and thereby associated the cause of this oppressed people with that of all generous minds! Napoleon asked one of his generals, in the presence of M. de Balasheff, if he had ever been at Moscow, and what sort of city it was. The general replied that it had appeared to him to be rather a large village than a capital. And how many churches are there in it?--continued the emperor. About sixteen hundred:--was the reply. That is quite inconceivable, rejoined Napoleon, at a time when the world has ceased to be religious. Pardon me, sire, said M. de Balashoff, the Russians and Spaniards are so still. Admirable reply! and which presaged, one would hope, that the Russians would be the Castilians of the North. Nevertheless, the French army made rapid progress, and one has been so accustomed to see the French triumphing over every thing abroad, although at home they know not how to resist any sort of yoke, that I had some reason to apprehend meeting them already on the road to Moscow. What a capricious destiny, for me to flee at first from the French, among whom I was born, and who had carried my father in triumph, and now to flee from them even to the borders of Asia! But, in short, what destiny is there, great or little, which the man selected to humble man does not overthrow? I thought I should be obliged to go to Odessa, a city which had become prosperous under the enlightened administration of the Duke of Richelieu, and from thence I might have gone to Constantinople and into Greece; I consoled myself for this long voyage by the idea of a poem on Richard Coeur-de-Lion, which I have the intention of writing, if life and health are spared me. This poem is designed to paint the manners and character of the East, and to consecrate a grand epoch in the English history, that when the enthusiasm of the Crusades gave place to the enthusiasm of liberty. But as we cannot paint what we have not seen, no more than we can express properly what we have not felt, it was necessary for me to go to Constantinople, into Syria, and into Sicily, there to follow the steps of Richard. My travelling companions, better acquainted with my strength than I was myself, dissuaded me from such an undertaking, and assured me that by using expedition, I could travel post much quicker than an army. It will be seen that I had not in fact a great deal of time to spare. CHAPTER 11. Kiow. Determined to continue my journey through Russia, I proceeded towards Kiow, the principal city of the Ukraine, and formerly of all Russia, for this empire began by fixing its capital in the South. The Russians had then continual communication with the Greeks established at Constantinople, and in general with the people of the East, whose habits they have adopted in a variety of instances. The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable; you see large plains of wheat which appear to be cultivated by invisible hands, the habitations and inhabitants are so rare. You must not expect, in approaching Kiow, or the greater part of what are called cities in Russia, to find any thing resembling the cities of the West; the roads are not better kept, nor do country houses indicate a more numerous population. On my arrival at Kiow, the first object that met my eyes was a cemetery, and this was the first indication to me of being near a place where men were collected. The houses at Kiow generally resemble tents, and at a distance, the city appears like a camp; I could not help fancying that the moveable residences of the Tartars had furnished models for the construction of those wooden houses, which have not a much greater appearance of solidity. A few days are sufficient for building them; they are very often consumed by fire, and an order is sent to the forest for a house, as you would send to market to lay in your winter stock of provisions. In the middle of these huts, however, palaces have been erected, and a number of churches, whose green and gilt cupolas singularly draw the attention. When towards the evening the sun darts his rays on these brilliant domes, you would fancy that it was rather an illumination for a festival, than a durable edifice. The Russians never pass a church without making the sign of the cross, and their longbeards add greatly to the religious expression of their physiognomy. They generally wear a large blue robe, fastened round the waist by a scarlet band: the dresses of the women have also something Asiatic in them: and one remarks that taste for lively colours which we derive from the East, where the sun is so beautiful, that one likes to make his eclat more conspicuous by the objects which he shines upon. I speedily contracted such a partiality to these oriental dresses, that I could not bear to see Russians dressed like other Europeans; they seemed to me then entering into that great regularity of the despotism of Napoleon, which first makes all nations a present of the conscription, then of the war-taxes, and lastly, of the Code Napoleon, in order to govern in the same manner, nations of totally different characters. The Dnieper, which the ancients called Borysthenes, passes by Kiow, and the old tradition of the country affirms, that it was a boatman, who in crossing it found its waters so pure that he was led to found a town on its banks. In fact, the rivers are the most beautiful natural objects in Russia. It would be difficult to find any small streams, their course would be so much obstructed by the sand. There is scarcely any variety of trees; the melancholy birch is incessantly recurring in this uninventive nature; even the want of stones might be almost regretted, so much is the eye sometimes fatigued with meeting neither hill nor valley, and to be always making progress without encountering new objects. The rivers relieve the imagination from this fatigue; the priests, therefore, bestow their benedictions on these rivers. The emperor, empress, and the whole court attend the ceremony of the benediction of the Neva, at the moment of the severest cold of winter. It is said that Wladimir, at the commencement of the eleventh century, declared, that all the waters of the Borysthenes were holy, and that plunging in them was sufficient to make a man a Christian; the baptism of the Greeks being performed by immersion, millions of men went into this river to abjure their idolatry. It was this same Vladimir who sent deputies to different countries, to learn which of all the religions it best suited him to adopt; he decided for the Greek ritual, on account of the pomp of its ceremonies. Perhaps also he preferred it for more important reasons; in fact the Greek faith by excluding the papal power, gives the sovereign of Russia the spiritual and temporal power united. The Greek religion is necessarily less intolerant than the Roman Catholic; for being itself reproached as a schism, it can hardly complain of heretics; all religions therefore are admitted into Russia, and from the borders of the Don to those of the Neva, the fraternity of country unites men, even though their theological opinions may separate them. The Greek priests are allowed to marry, and scarcely any gentleman embraces this profession: it follows that the clergy has very little political ascendancy; it acts upon the people, but it is very submissive to the emperor. The ceremonies of the Greek worship are at least as beautiful as those of the catholics; the church music is heavenly; every thing in this worship leads to meditation; it has something of poetry and feeling about it, but it appears better adapted to captivate the imagination than to regulate the conduct. When the priest comes out of the sanctuary, in which he remains shut up while he communicates, you would say that you saw the gates of light opening; the cloud of incense which surrounds him, the gold and silver, and precious stones, which glitter on his robes and in the church, seem to come from countries where the sun is an object of adoration. The devout sentiments which are inspired by gothic architecture in Germany, France and England, cannot be at all compared with the effect of the Greek churches; they rather remind us of the minarets of the Turks and Arabs than of our churches. As little must we expect to find, as in Italy, the splendor of the fine arts; their most remarkable ornaments are virgins and saints crowned with rubies and diamonds. Magnificence is the character of every thing one sees in Russia; neither the genius of man nor the gifts of nature constitute its beauties. The ceremonies of marriage, of baptism, and of burial, are noble and affecting; we find in them some ancient customs of Grecian idolatry, but only those which, having no connection with doctrine, can add to the impression of the three great scenes of life, birth, marriage and death. The Russian peasants still continue the custom of addressing the dead previous to a final separation from his remains. Why is it, say they, that thou hast abandoned us? Wert thou then unhappy on this earth? Was not thy wife fair and good? Why therefore hast thou left her? The dead replies not, but the value of existence is thus proclaimed in the presence of those who still preserve it. At Kiow we were shown some catacombs which reminded us a little of those at Rome, and to which pilgrimages are made on foot from Casan and other cities bordering on Asia; but these pilgrimages cost less in Russia, than they would anywhere else, although the distances are much greater. It is in the character of the people to have no fear of fatigue or of any bodily suffering; in this nation there is both patience and activity, both gaiety and melancholy. You see united the most striking contrasts, and it is that which makes one predict great things of them; for generally it is only in beings of superior order that we find an union of opposite qualities; the mass is in general of a uniform color. I made at Kiow the trial of Russian hospitality. The governor of the province, General Miloradowitsch, loaded me with the most amiable attentions; he had been an aide-de-camp of Suwarow, like him intrepid; he inspired me with greater confidence than I then had in the military successes of the Russians. Before this, I had only happened to meet some officers of the German school, who had entirely got rid of their Russian character. I saw in General Miloradowitsch a real Russian; brave, impetuous, confident, and wholly free from that spirit of imitation which sometimes entirely robs his countrymen even of their national character. He told me a number of anecdotes of Suwarow, which prove that that warrior studied a great deal, although he preserved the original instinct which is connected with the immediate knowledge of men and things. He carefully concealed his studies to strike with greater force the imagination of his troops, by assuming in all things an air of inspiration. The Russians have, in my opinion, much greater resemblance to the people of the South, or rather of the East, than to those of the North. What is European in them belongs merely to the manners of the court, which are nearly the same in all countries; but their nature is eastern. General Miloradowitsch related to me that a regiment of Kalmucks had been put into garrison at Kiow, and that the prince of these Kalmucks came to him one day, to confess that he suffered very much from passing the winter cooped up in a town, and wished to obtain permission to encamp in the neighbouring forest. Such a cheap pleasure it was impossible to refuse him; he and all his regiment went in consequence, in the middle of the snow, to take up their abode in their chariots, which at the same time serve them for huts. The Russian soldiers bear nearly in the same degree the fatigues and privations of climate or of war, and the people of all classes exhibit a contempt of obstacles and of physical suffering, which will carry them successfully through the greatest undertakings. This Kalmuck prince, to whom wooden houses appeared a residence too delicate in the middle of winter, gave diamonds to the ladies who pleased him at a ball; and as he could not make himself understood by them, he substituted presents for compliments, in the manner practised in India and other silent countries of the East, where speech has less influence than with us. General Miloradowitsch invited me the very evening of my departure, to a ball at the house of a Moldavian princess, to which I regretted very much being unable to go. All these names of foreign countries and of nations which are scarcely any longer European, singularly awaken the imagination. You feel yourself in Russia at the gate of another earth, near to that East from which have proceeded so many religious creeds, and which still contains in its bosom incredible treasures of perseverance and reflection. CHAPTER 12. Road from Kiow to Moscow. About nine hundred versts still separated Kiow from Moscow. My Russian coachmen drove me along like lightning, singing airs, the words of which I was told were compliments and encouragements to their horses, "Go along," they said, "my friends: we know one another: go quick." I have as yet seen nothing at all barbarous in this people; on the contrary their forms have an elegance and softness about them which you find no where else. Never does a Russian coachman pass a female, of whatever age or rank she may be, without saluting her, and the female returns it by an inclination of the head which is always noble and graceful. An old man who could not make himself understood by me, pointed to the earth, and then to the heaven, to signify to me, that the one would shortly be to him the road to the other. I know very well that the shocking barbarities which disfigure the history of Russia may be urged, reasonably, as evidence of a contrary character; but these I should rather lay to the charge of the boyars, the class which was depraved by the despotism which it exercised or submitted to, than to the nation itself. Besides, political dissentions, everywhere and at all times, distort national character, and there is nothing more deplorable than that succession of masters, whom crimes have elevated or overturned; but such is the fatal condition of absolute power on this earth. The civil servants of the government, of an inferior class, all those who look to make their fortune by their suppleness or intrigues, in no degree resemble the inhabitants of the country, and I can readily believe all the ill that has been and may be said of them; but to appreciate properly the character of a warlike nation, we must look to its soldiers, and the class from which its soldiers are taken, the peasantry. Although I was driven along with great rapidity, it seemed to me that I did not advance a step, the country was so extremely monotonous. Plains of sand, forests of birch tree, and villages at a great distance from each other, composed of wooden houses all built upon the same plan: these were the only objects that my eyes encountered. I felt that sort of nightmare which sometimes seizes one during the night, when you think you are always marching and never advancing. The country appeared to me like the image of infinite space, and to require eternity to traverse it. Every instant you met couriers passing, who went along with incredible swiftness; they were seated on a wooden bench placed across a little cart drawn by two horses, and nothing stopped them for a moment. The jolting of their carriage sometimes made them spring two feet above it, but they fell with astonishing address, and made haste to call out in Russian, forward, with an energy similar to that of the French on a day of battle. The Sclavonian language is singularly echoing; I should almost say there is something metallic about it; you would think you heard a bell striking, when the Russians pronounce certain letters of their alphabet, quite different from those which compose the dialects of the West. We saw passing some corps de reserve approaching by forced marches to the theatre of war; the Cossacks were repairing, one by one, to the army, without order or uniform, with a long lance in their hand, and a kind of grey dress, whose ample hood they put over their head. I had formed quite another idea of these people; they live behind the Dnieper; there their way of living is independent, in the manner of savages; but during war they allow themselves to be governed despotically. One is accustomed to see, in fine uniforms of brilliant colors, the most formidable armies. The dull colors of the Cossack dress excite another sort of fear; one might say that they are ghosts who pounce upon you. Half way between Kiow and Moscow, as we were already in the vicinity of the armies, horses became more scarce. I began to be afraid of being detained in my journey, at the very moment when the necessity of speed became most urgent; and when I had to wait for five or six hours in front of a post-house, (as there was seldom an apartment into which I could enter) I thought with trembling of that army which might overtake me at the extremity of Europe, and render my situation at once tragical and ridiculous; for it is thus with the failure of an undertaking of this kind. The circumstances which compelled me to it not being generally known, I might have been asked why I quitted my own house, even although it had been made a prison to me, and there are good enough people who would not have failed to say, with an air of compunction, that it was very unlucky, but I should have done better to stay where I was. If tyranny had only its direct partisans on its side, it could never maintain itself; the astonishing thing, and which proves human misery more than all, is, that the greater part of mediocre people enlist themselves in the service of events: they have not the strength to think deeper than a fact, and when an oppressor has triumphed, and a victim has been destroyed, they hasten to justify, not exactly the tyrant, but the destiny whose instrument he is. Weakness of mind and character is no doubt the cause of this servility: but there is also in man a certain desire of finding destiny, whatever it may be, in the right, as if it was a way of living in peace with it. I reached at last that part of my road which removed me from the theatre of war, and arrived in the governments of Orel and Toula, which have been so much talked of since, in the bulletins of the two armies. I was received in these solitary abodes, for so the provincial towns in Russia appear, with the most perfect hospitality. Several gentlemen of the neighbourhood came to my inn, to compliment me on my writings, and I confess having been flattered to find that my literary reputation had extended to this distance from my native country. The lady of the governor received me in the Asiatic style, with sherbet and roses; her apartment was elegantly furnished with musical instruments and pictures. In Europe you see every where the contrast of wealth and poverty; but in Russia it may be said that neither one nor the other makes itself remarked. The people are not poor; the great know how to lead, when it is necessary, the same life as the people: it is the mixture of the hardest privations and of the most refined enjoyments which characterizes the country. These same noblemen, whose residence unites all that the luxury of different parts of the world has most attractive, live, while they are travelling, on much worse food than our French peasantry, and know how to bear, not only during war, but in various circumstances of life, a physical existence of the most disagreeable kind. The severity of the climate, the marshes, the forests, the deserts, of which a great part of the country is composed, place man in a continual struggle with nature. Fruits, and even flowers, only grow in hot-houses; vegetables are not generally cultivated; and there are no vines any where. The habitual mode of life of the French peasants could not be obtained in Russia but at a very great expense. There they have only necessaries by luxury: whence it happens that when luxury is unattainable, even necessaries are renounced. What the English call comforts are hardly to be met with in Russia. You will never find any thing sufficiently perfect to satisfy in all ways the imagination of the great Russian noblemen; but when this poetry of wealth fails them, they drink hydromel, sleep upon a board, and travel day and night in an open carriage, without regretting the luxury to which one would think they had been habituated. It is rather as magnificence that they love fortune, than from the pleasures they derive from it: resembling still in that point the Easterns, who exercise hospitality to strangers, load them with presents, and yet frequently neglect the every day comforts of their own life. This is one of the reasons which explains that noble courage with which the Russians have supported the ruin which has been occasioned them by the burning of Moscow. More accustomed to external pomp than to the care of themselves, they are not mollified by luxury, and the sacrifice of money satisfies their pride as much or more than the magnificence of their expenditure. What characterizes this people, is something gigantic of all kinds: ordinary dimensions are not at all applicable to it. I do not by that mean to say that neither real grandeur nor stability are to be met with in it: but the boldness and the imagination of the Russians know no bounds: with them every thing is colossal rather than well proportioned, audacious rather than reflective, and if they do not hit the mark, it is because they overshoot it. CHAPTER 13. Appearance of the Country.--Character of the Russians. I was always advancing nearer to Moscow, but nothing yet indicated the approach to a capital. The wooden villages were equally distant from each other, we saw no greater movement upon the immense plains which are called high roads; you heard no more noise; the country houses were not more numerous: there is so much space in Russia that every thing is lost in it, even the chateaux, even the population. You might suppose you were travelling through a country from which the people had just taken their departure. The absence of birds adds to this silence; cattle also are rare, or at least they are placed at a great distance from the road. Extent makes every thing disappear, except extent itself, like certain ideas in metaphysics, of which the mind can never get rid, when it has once seized them. On the eve of my arrival at Moscow, I stopped in the evening of a very hot day, in a pleasant meadow: the female peasants, in picturesque dresses, according to the custom of the country, were returning from their labour, singing those airs of the Ukraine, the words of which, in praise of love and liberty, breathe a sort of melancholy approaching to regret. I requested them to dance, and they consented. I know nothing more graceful than these dances of the country, which have all the originality which nature gives to the fine arts; a certain modest voluptuousness was remarkable in them; the Indian bayaderes should have something analogous to that mixture of indolence and vivacity which forms the charm of the Russian dance. This indolence and vivacity are indicative of reverie and passion, two elements of character which civilization has yet neither formed nor subdued. I was struck with the mild gaiety of these female peasants, as I had been, in different degrees, with that of the greater part of the common people with whom I had come in contact in Russia. I can readily believe that they are terrible when their passions are provoked; and as they have no education, they know not how to curb their violence. As another result of this ignorance, they have few principles of morality, and theft is very frequent in Russia as well as hospitality; they give as they take, according as their imagination is acted upon by cunning or generosity, both of which excite the admiration of this people. In this mode of life there is a little resemblance to savages; but it strikes me that at present there are no European nations who have much vigor but those who are what is called barbarous, in other words, unenlightened, or those who are free: but the nations which have only acquired from civilization an indifference for this or that yoke, provided their own fire-side is not disturbed: those nations, which have only learned from civilization the art of explaining power and of reasoning servitude, are made to be vanquished. I frequently imagine to myself what may now be the situation of the places which I have seen so tranquil, of those amiable young girls, of those long bearded peasants, who followed so peaceably the lot which providence had traced for them; they have perished or fled, for not one of them entered into the service of the victor. A thing worthy of remark, is the extent to which public spirit is displayed in Russia. The reputation of invincible which their multiplied successes have given to this nation, the natural pride of the nobility, the devotedness inherent in the character of the people, the profound influence of religion, the hatred of foreigners, which Peter I. endeavoured to destroy in order to enlighten and civilize his country, but which is not less settled in the blood of the Russians, and is occasionally roused, all these causes combined make them a most energetic people. Some bad anecdotes of the preceding reigns, some Russians who have contracted debts with the Parisian shopkeepers, and some bon-mots of Diderot, have put it into the heads of the French, that Russia consisted only of a corrupt court, military chamberlains, and a people of slaves. This is a great mistake. This nation it is true requires a long examination to know it thoroughly, but in the circumstances in which I observed it, every thing was salient, and a country can never be seen to greater advantage than at a period of misfortune and courage. It cannot be too often repeated, this nation is composed of the most striking contrasts. Perhaps the mixture of European civilization and of Asiatic character is the cause. The manner of the Russians is so obliging that you might imagine yourself, the very first day, intimate with them, and probably at the end of ten years you would not be so! The silence of a Russian is altogether extraordinary; this silence is solely occasioned by what he takes a deep interest in. In other respects, they talk as much as you will; but their conversation teaches you nothing but their politeness; it betrays neither their feelings nor opinions. They have been frequently compared to the French, in my opinion with the least justice in the world. The flexibility of their organs makes imitation in all things a matter of ease to them; they are English, French, or German in their manners, according to circumstances; but they never cease to be Russians, that is to say uniting impetuosity and reserve, more capable of passion than friendship, more bold than delicate, more devout than virtuous, more brave than chivalrous, and so violent in their desires that nothing can stop them, when their gratification is in question. They are much more hospitable than the French; but society does not with them, as with us, consist of a circle of clever people of both sexes, who take pleasure in talking together. They meet, as we go to a fete, to see a great deal of company, to have fruits and rare productions from Asia or Europe; to hear music, to play; in short to receive vivid emotions from external objects, rather than from the heart or understanding, both of which they reserve for actions and not for company. Besides, as they are in general very ignorant, they find very little pleasure in serious conversation, and do not at all pique themselves on shining by the wit they can exhibit in it. Poetry, eloquence and literature are not yet to be found in Russia; luxury, power, and courage are the principal objects of pride and ambition; all other methods of acquiring distinction appear as yet effeminate and vain to this nation. But the people are slaves, it will be said: what character therefore can they be supposed to have? It is not certainly necessary for me to say that all enlightened people wish to see the Russian people freed from this state, and probably no one wishes it more strongly than the Emperor Alexander: but the Russian slavery has no resemblance in its effects to that of which we form the idea in the West; it is not as under the feudal system, victors who have imposed severe laws on the vanquished; the ties which connect the grandees with the people resemble rather what was called a family of slaves among the ancients, than the state of serfs among the moderns. There is no middling class in Russia, which is a great drawback on the progress of literature and the arts; for it is generally in that class that knowledge is developed: but the want of any intermedium between the nobility and the people creates a greater affection between them both. The distance between the two classes appears greater, because there are no steps between these two extremities, which in fact border very nearly on each other, not being separated by a middling class. This is a state of social organization quite unfavorable to the knowledge of the higher classes, but not so to the happiness of the lower. Besides, where there is no representative government, that is to say, in countries where the sovereign still promulgates the law which he is to execute, men are frequently more degraded by the very sacrifice of their reason and character, than they are in this vast empire, in which a few simple ideas of religion and country serve to lead the great mass under the guidance of a few heads. The immense extent of the Russian empire also prevents the despotism of the great from pressing heavily in detail upon the people; and finally, above all, the religious and military spirit is so predominant in the nation, that allowance may be made for a great many errors, in favor of those two great sources of noble actions. A person of fine intellect said, that Russia resembled the plays of Shakspeare, in which all that is not faulty is sublime, and all that is not sublime is faulty; an observation of remarkable justice. But in the great crisis in which Russia was placed when I passed through it, it was impossible not to admire the energetic resistance, and resignation to sacrifices exhibited by that nation; and one could not almost dare, at the contemplation of such virtues, to allow one's self even to notice what at other times one would have censured. CHAPTER 14. Moscow. Gilded cupolas announced Moscow from afar; however, as the surrounding country is only a plain, as well as the whole of Russia, you may arrive in that great city without being struck with its extent. It has been well said by some one, that Moscow was rather a province than a city. In fact, you there see huts, houses, palaces, a bazaar as in the East, churches, public buildings, pieces of water, woods and parks. The variety of manners, and of the nations of which Russia is composed, are all exhibited in this immense residence. Will you, I was asked, buy some Cashmere shawls in the Tartar quarter? Have you seen the Chinese town? Asia and Europe are found united in this immense city. There is more liberty enjoyed in it than at Petersburg, where the court necessarily exercises great influence. The great nobility settled at Moscow were not ambitious of places; but they proved their patriotism by munificent gifts to the state, either for public establishments during peace, or as aids during the war. The colossal fortunes of the great Russian nobility are employed in making collections of all kinds, and in enterprises of which the Arabian Nights have given the models; these fortunes are also frequently lost by the unbridled passions of their possessors. When I arrived at Moscow, nothing was talked of but the sacrifices that were made on account of the war. A young Count de Momonoff raised a regiment for the state, and would only serve in it as a sublieutenant; a Countess Orloff, amiable and wealthy in the Asiatic style, gave the fourth of her income. As I was passing before these palaces surrounded by gardens, where space was thrown away in a city as elsewhere in the middle of the country, I was told that the possessor of this superb residence had given a thousand peasants to the state: and another, two hundred. I had some difficulty in accommodating myself to the expression, giving men, but the peasants themselves offered their services with ardor, and their lords were in this war only their interpreters. As soon as a Russian becomes a soldier, his beard is cut off, and from that moment he is free. A desire was felt that all those who might have served in the militia should also be considered as free: but in that case the nation would have been entirely so, for it rose almost en masse. Let us hope that this so much desired emancipation may be effected without violence: but in the mean time one would wish to have the beards preserved, so much strength and dignity do they add to the physiognomy. The Russians with long beards never pass a church without making the sign of the cross, and their confidence in the visible images of religion is very affecting. Their churches bear the mark of that taste for luxury which they have from Asia: you see in them only ornaments of gold, and silver, and rubies. I was told that a Russian had proposed to form an alphabet with precious stones, and to write a Bible in that manner. He knew the best manner of interesting the imaginations of the Russians in what they read. This imagination however has not as yet manifested itself either in the fine arts or in poetry. They reach a certain point in all things very quickly, and do not go beyond that. Impulse makes them take the first steps: but the second belong to reflection, and these Russians, who have nothing in common with the people of the North, are as yet very little capable of meditation. Several of the palaces of Moscow are of wood, in order that they may be built quicker, and that the natural inconstancy of the nation, in every thing unconnected with country or religion, may be satisfied by an easy change of residence. Several of these fine edifices have been constructed for an entertainment; they were destined to add to the eclat of a day, and the rich manner in which they were decorated has made them last up to this period of universal destruction. A great number of houses are painted green, yellow, or rose color, and are sculptured in detail like dessert ornaments. The citadel of the Kremlin, in which the emperors of Russia defended themselves against the Tartars, is surrounded by a high wall, embattled and flanked with turrets, which, by their odd shapes, remind one of a Turkish minaret rather than a fortress like those of the West of Europe. But although the external character of the buildings of the city be oriental, the impression of Christianity was found in that, multitude of churches so much venerated, and which attracted your notice at every step. One was reminded of Rome in seeing Moscow; certainly not from the monuments being of the same style, but because the mixture of solitary country and magnificent palaces, the grandeur of the city and the infinite number of its churches give the Asiatic Rome some points of resemblance to the European Rome. It was about the beginning of August, that I was allowed to see the interior of the Kremlin; I got there by the same staircase which the emperor Alexander had ascended a few days preceding, surrounded by an immense people, who loaded him with their blessings, and promised him to defend his empire at all hazards. This people has kept its word. The halls were first thrown open to me in which the arms of the ancient warriors of Russia are contained; the arsenals of this kind, in other parts of Europe, are much more interesting. The Russians have taken no part in the times of chivalry; they never mingled in the Crusades. Constantly at war with the Tartars, Poles, and Turks, the military spirit has been formed among them in the midst of the atrocities of all kinds brought in the train of Asiatic nations, and of the tyrants who governed Russia. It is not therefore the generous bravery of the Bayards or the Percys, but the intrepidity of a fanatical courage which has been exhibited in this country for several centuries. The Russians, in the relations of society, which are so new to them, are not distinguished by the spirit of chivalry, such as the people of the West conceive it; but they have always shown themselves terrible to their enemies. So many massacres have taken place in the interior of Russia, up to the reign of Peter the Great, and even later, that the morality of the nation, and particularly that of the great nobility, must have suffered severely from them. These despotic governments, whose sole restraint is the assassination of the despot, overthrow all principles of honor and duty in the minds of men: but the love of their country and an attachment to their religious creed have been maintained in their full strength, amidst the wrecks of this bloody history, and the nation which preserves such virtues may yet astonish the world. From the ancient arsenal I was conducted into the apartments formerly occupied by the czars, and in which the robes are preserved which they wore on the day of their coronation. These apartments have no sort of beauty, but they agreed very well with the hard life which the czars led and still lead. The greatest magnificence reigns in the palace of Alexander; but he himself sleeps upon the floor, and travels like a Cossack officer. They exhibited in the Kremlin a divided throne, which was filled at first by Peter I. and Ivan his brother. The princess Sophia, their sister, placed herself behind the seat of Ivan, and dictated to him what to say; but this borrowed strength was not able to cope long with the native strength of Peter I. and he soon reigned alone. It is from the period of his reign that the czars have ceased to wear the Asiatic costume. The great wig of the age of Louis XIV. came in with Peter I. and without touching upon the admiration inspired by this great man, one cannot help feeling the disagreeable contrast between the ferocity of his genius and the ceremonious regularity of his dress. Was he in the right in doing away as much as he could, oriental manners from the bosom of his people? was it right to fix his capital in the north, and at the extremity of his empire? These are great questions which are not yet answered: centuries only can afford the proper commentaries upon such lofty ideas. I ascended to the top of the cathedral steeple, called Ivan Veliki, which commands a view of the whole city; from thence I saw the palace of the czars, who conquered by their arms the crowns of Casan, Astracan, and Siberia. I heard the church music, in which the catholikos, prince of Georgia, officiated in the midst of the inhabitants of Moscow, and formed a Christian meeting between Asia and Europe. Fifteen hundred Churches attested the devotion of the Muscovite people. The commercial establishments at Moscow had quite an Asiatic character; men in turbans, and others dressed in the different costumes of all the people of the East, exhibited the rarest merchandize: the furs of Siberia and the muslins of India there offered all the enjoyments of luxury to those great noblemen, whose imagination is equally pleased with the sables of the Samoiedes and with the rubies of the Persians. Here, the gardens and the palace Razoumowski contained the most beautiful collection of plants and minerals; there, was the fine library of the Count de Bouterlin, which he had spent thirty years of his life in collecting: among the books he possessed, there were several which contained manuscript notes in the hand-writing of Peter I. This great man never imagined that the same European civilization, of which he was so jealous, would come to destroy the establishments for public instruction which he had founded in the middle of his empire, with a view to form by study the impatient spirit of the Russians. Farther on, was the Foundling House, one of the most affecting institutions of Europe; hospitals for all classes of society might be remarked in the different quarters of the city: finally, the eye in its wanderings could rest upon nothing but wealth or benevolence, upon edifices of luxury or of charity; upon churches or on palaces, which diffused happiness or distinction upon a large portion of the human race. You saw the windings of the Moskwa, of that river, which, since the last invasion by the Tartars, had never rolled with blood in its waves: the day was delightful; the sun seemed to take a pleasure in shedding his rays upon these glittering cupolas. I was reminded of the old archbishop Plato, who had just written a pastoral letter to the emperor Alexander, the oriental style of which had extremely affected me: he sent the image of the Virgin from the borders of Europe, to drive far from Asia the man who wished to bear down upon the Russians with the whole weight of the nations chained to his steps. For a moment the thought struck me that Napoleon might yet set his foot upon this same tower from which I was admiring the city, which his presence was about to extinguish; for a moment I dreamed that he would glory in replacing, in the palace of the czars, the chief of the great horde, which had also once had possession of it: but the sky was so beautiful, that I repelled the apprehension. A month afterwards, this beautiful city was in ashes, in order that it should be said, that every country which had been in alliance with this man, should be destroyed by the fires which are at his disposal. But how gloriously have the Russians and their monarch redeemed this error! The misery of Moscow may be even said to have regenerated the empire, and this religious city has perished like a martyr, the shedding of whose blood gives new strength to the brethren who survive him. The famous Count Rostopchin, with whose name the emperor's bulletins have been filled, came to see me, and invited me to dine with him. He had been minister for foreign affairs to Paul I., his conversation had something original about it, and you could easily perceive that his character would show itself in a very strong manner, if circumstances required it. The Countess Rostopchin was good enough to give me a book which she had written on the triumphs of religion, the style and morality of which were very pure. I went to visit her at her country-house, in the interior of Moscow. I was obliged to cross a lake and a wood in order to reach it: it was to this house, one of the most agreeable residences in Russia, that Count Rostopchin himself set-fire, on the approach of the French army. Certainly an action of this kind was likely to excite a certain kind of admiration, even in enemies. The emperor Napoleon has, notwithstanding, compared Count Rostopchin to Marat, forgetting that the governor of Moscow sacrificed his own interests, while Marat set fire to the houses of others, which certainly makes a considerable difference. The only thing which Count Rostopchin could properly be reproached with, was his concealing too long the bad news from the armies, either from flattering himself, or believing it to be necessary to flatter others. The English, with that admirable rectitude which distinguishes all their actions, publish as faithful an account of their reverses as they do of their victories, and enthusiasm is with them sustained by the truth, whatever that may be. The Russians cannot yet reach that moral perfection, which is the result of a free constitution. No civilized nation has so much in common with savages as the Russian people, and when their nobility possess energy, they participate also in the defects and good qualities of that unshackled nature. The expression of Diderot has been greatly vaunted: The Russians are rotten before they are ripe. I know nothing more false; their very vices, with some exceptions, are not those of corruption, but of violence. The desires of a Russian, said a very superior man, would blow up a city: fury and artifice take possession of them by turns, when they wish to accomplish any resolution, good or bad. Their nature is not at all changed by the rapid civilization which was given them by Peter I.; it has as yet only formed their manners: happily for them, they are always what we call barbarians, in other words, led by an instinct frequently generous, but always involuntary, which only admits of reflection in the choice of the means, and not in the examination of the end; I say happily for them, not that I wish to extol barbarism, but I designate by this name a certain primitive energy which can alone replace in nations the concentrated strength of liberty. I saw at Moscow the most enlightened men in the career of science and literature; but there, as well as at Petersburg, the professors' chairs are almost entirely filled with Germans. There is in Russia a great scarcity of well-informed men in any branch; young people in general only go to the University to be enabled sooner to enter into the military profession. Civil employments in Russia confer a rank corresponding to a grade in the army; the spirit of the nation is turned entirely towards war: in every thing else, in administration, in political economy, in public instruction, &c. the other nations of Europe have hitherto borne away the palm from the Russians. They are making attempts, however, in literature; the softness and brilliancy of the sounds of their language are remarked even by those who do not understand it; and it should be very well adapted for poetry and music. But the Russians have, like so many other continental nations, the fault of imitating the French literature, which, even with all its beauties, is only fit for the French themselves. I think that the Russians ought rather to make their literary studies derive from the Greeks than from the Latins. The characters of the Russian alphabet, so similar to those of the Greeks, the ancient communication of the Russians with the Byzantine empire, their future destinies, which will probably lead them to the illustrious monuments of Athens and Sparta, all this ought to turn the Russians to the study of Greek: but it is above all necessary that their writers should draw their poetry from the deepest inspiration of their own soul. Their works, up to this time, have been composed, as one may say, by the lips, and never can a nation so vehement be stirred up by such shrill notes. CHAPTER 15 Road from Moscow to Petersburg. I quitted Moscow with regret: I stopped a short time in a wood near the city, where on holidays the inhabitants go to dance, and celebrate the sun, whose splendor is of such short duration, even at Moscow. What is it then I see, in advancing towards the North? Even these eternal birch trees, which weary you with their monotony, become very rare, it is said, as you approach Archangel; they are preserved there, like orange trees in France. The country from Moscow to Petersburg is at first sandy, and afterwards all marsh: when it rains, the ground becomes black, and the high road becomes undistinguishable. The houses of the peasants, however, every where indicate a state of comfort; they are decorated with columns, and the windows are surrounded with arabesques carved in wood. Although it was summer when I passed through this country, I already felt the threatening winter which seemed to conceal itself behind the clouds: of the fruits which were offered to me, the flavor was bitter, because their ripening had been too much hastened; a rose excited emotion in me as a recollection of our fine countries, and the flowers themselves appeared to carry their heads with less pride, as if the icy hand of the North had been already prepared to pluck them. I passed through Novogorod, which was, six centuries ago, a republic associated with the Hanse towns, and which has preserved for a long period a spirit of republican independence. Persons have been pleased to say that freedom was not reclaimed in Europe before the last century; on the contrary, it is rather despotism, which is a modern invention. Even in Russia the slavery of the peasants was only introduced in the sixteenth century. Up to the reign of Peter I. the form of all the ukases was: The boyars have advised, the czar will decree. Peter I. although in many ways he has done infinite good to Russia, humbled the grandees, and united in himself the temporal and spiritual power, in order to remove all obstacles to his designs. Richelieu acted in the same manner in France; Peter I. was therefore a great admirer of his. It will be recollected that on being shown his tomb at Paris, he exclaimed, "Great man! I would give one half of my empire to learn from thee how to govern the other." The czar on this occasion was a great deal too modest, for he had the advantage over Richelieu of being a great warrior, and what is more, the founder of the navy and commerce of his country; while Richelieu has done nothing but govern tyrannically at home, and craftily abroad. But to return to Novogorod. Ivan Vasilewitch possessed himself of it in 1470, and destroyed its liberties; he removed from it to the Kremlin at Moscow, the great bell called in Russian, Wetchevoy kolokol, at the sound of which the citizens had been accustomed to assemble at the market place, to deliberate on public matters. With the loss of liberty, Novogorod had the mortification to see the gradual disappearance of its population, its commerce, and its wealth: so withering and destructive is the breath of arbitrary power, says the best historian of Russia. Even at the present day the city of Novogorod presents an aspect of singular melancholy; a vast inclosure indicates that it was formerly large and populous, and you see nothing in it but scattered houses, the inhabitants of which seem to be placed there like figures weeping over the tombs. The same spectacle is now probably offered by the beautiful city of Moscow; but the public spirit will rebuild it, as it has reconquered it. CHAPTER 16. St. Petersburg. From Novogorod to Petersburg, you see scarcely anything but marshes, and you arrive in one of the finest cities in the world, as if, with a magic wand, an enchanter had made all the wonders of Europe and Asia start up from the middle of the deserts. The foundation of Petersburg offers the greatest proof of that ardor of Russian will, which recognizes nothing as impossible: everything in the environs is humble; the city is built upon a marsh, and even the marble rests on piles; but you forget when looking at these superb edifices, their frail foundations, and cannot help meditating on the miracle of so fine a city being built in so short a time. This people which must always be described by contrasts, possesses an unheard of perseverance in its struggles with nature or with hostile armies. Necessity always found the Russians patient and invincible, but in the ordinary course of life they are very unsteady. The same men, the same masters, do not long inspire them with enthusiasm; reflection alone can guarantee the duration of feelings and opinions in the habitual quiet of life, and the Russians, like all people subject to despotism, are more capable of dissimulation than reflection. On my arrival at Petersburg my first sentiment was to return thanks to heaven for being on the borders of the sea. I saw waving on the Neva the English flag, the symbol of liberty, and I felt that on committing myself to the ocean, I might return under the immediate power of the Deity; it is an illusion which one cannot help entertaining, to believe one's self more under the hand of Providence, when delivered to the elements than when depending on men, and especially on that man who appears to be a revelation of the evil principle on this earth. Just facing the house which I inhabited at Petersburg was the statue of Peter I.; he is represented on horseback climbing a steep mountain, in the midst of serpents who try to stop the progress of his horse. These serpents, it is true, are put there to support the immense weight of the horse and his rider; but the idea is not a happy one: for in fact it is not envy which a sovereign can have to dread: neither are his adulators his enemies: and Peter I. especially had nothing to fear during his life, but from Russians who regretted the ancient customs of their country. The admiration of him, however, which is still preserved is the best proof of the good he did to Russia: for despots have no flatterers a hundred years after their death. On the pedestal of the statue is written: To Peter the First, Catherine the Second. This simple, yet proud, inscription has the merit of truth. These two great monarchs have elevated the Russian pride to the highest pitch; and to teach a nation to regard itself as invincible, is to make it such, at least within its own territory: for conquest is a chance which probably depends more upon the faults of the vanquished than upon the genius of the victor, It is said, and properly, that you cannot, at Petersburg, say of a woman, that she is as old as the streets, the streets themselves are so modern. The buildings still possess a dazzling whiteness, and at night when they are lighted by the moon, they look like large white phantoms regarding, immoveable, the course of the Neva. I know not what there is particularly beautiful in this river, but the waves of no other I had yet seen ever appeared to me so limpid. A succession of granite quays, thirty versts in length, borders its course, and this magnificent labour of man is worthy of the transparent water which it adorns. Had Peter I. directed similar undertakings towards the South of his empire, he would not have obtained what he wished, a navy; but he would perhaps have better conformed to the character of his nation. The Russian inhabitants of Petersburg have the look of a people of the South condemned to live in the North, and making every effort to struggle with a climate at variance 'with their nature. The inhabitants of the North are generally very indolent, and dread the cold, precisely because he is their daily enemy. The lower classes of the Russians have none of these habits; the coachmen wait for ten hours at the gate, during winter, without complaining; they sleep upon the snow, under their carriage, and transport the manners of the Lazzaroni of Naples to the Sixtieth degree of latitude. You may see them laying on the steps of staircases, like the Germans in their down; sometimes they sleep standing, with their head reclined against the wall. By turns indolent and impetuous, they give themselves up alternately to sleep, or to the most fatiguing employments. Some of them get drunk, in which they differ from the people of the South, who are very sober; but the Russians are so also, and to an extent hardly credible, when the difficulties of war require it. The great Russian noblemen also show, in their way, the tastes of inhabitants of the South. You must go and see the different country houses which they have built in the middle of an island formed by the Neva, in the centre of Petersburg. The plants of the South, the perfumes of the East, and the divans of Asia, embellish these residences. By immense hot houses, in which the fruits of all countries are ripened, an artificial climate is created. The possessors of these palaces endeavour not to lose the least ray of sun while he appears on their horizon; they treat him like a friend who is about to take his departure, whom they have known formerly in a more fortunate country. The day after my arrival, I went to dine with one of the most considerable merchants of the city, who exercised hospitality a la Russe; that is to say, he placed a flag on the top of his house to signify that he dined at home, and this invitation was sufficient for all his friends. He made us dine in the open air, so much pleasure was felt from these poor days of summer, of which a few yet remained, to which we should have scarcely given the name in the South of Europe. The garden was very agreeable; it was embellished with trees and flowers; but at four paces from the house the deserts and the marshes were again to be seen. In the environs of Petersburg, nature has the look of an enemy who resumes his advantages, when man ceases for a moment to struggle with him. The next morning I repaired to the church of Our Lady of Casan, built by Paul I. on the model of St. Peter's at Rome. The interior of this church, decorated with a great number of columns of granite is exceedingly beautiful; but the building itself displeases, precisely because it reminds us of St. Peter's: and because it differs from it so much the more, from the mere wish of imitation. It is impossible to create in two years what cost the labour of a century to the first artists of the universe. The Russians would by rapidity escape from time as they do from space: but time only preserves what it has founded, and the fine arts, of which inspiration seems the first source, cannot nevertheless dispense with reflection. From Our Lady of Casan I went to the convent of St. Alexander Newski, a place consecrated to one of the sovereign heroes of Russia, who extended his conquests to the borders of the Neva. The empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I. had a silver coffin made for him, upon which it is customary to put a piece of money, as a pledge of the vow which is recommended to the Saint. The tomb of Suwarow is in this convent of Alexander Newski, but his name is its only decoration; it is enough for him, but not for the Russians, to whom he rendered such important services. This nation, however, is so thoroughly military, that lofty achievements of that description excite less astonishment in it than other nations. The greatest families of Russia have erected tombs to their relatives in the cemetery which belongs to the church of Newski, but none of these monuments are worthy of remark; they are not beautiful, regarded as objects of art, and no grand idea there strikes the imagination. It is certain that the idea of death produces little effect on the Russians; whether it is from courage, or from the inconstancy of their impressions, long regrets are hardly in their character; they are more susceptible of superstition than emotion: superstition attaches to this life, and religion to another; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is on the contrary by the sacrifice of these same desires, that we are religious. M. de Romanzow, the minister of foreign affairs in Russia, loaded me with the most amiable attentions, and it was with regret that I considered him as so implicated in the system of the emperor Napoleon, that he must necessarily retire, like the English ministers, when that system was abandoned. Doubtless, in an absolute monarchy, the will of the master explains every thing; but the dignity of a prime minister perhaps requires that words of an opposite tendency should not proceed from the same mouth. The sovereign represents the state, and the state may change its system of politics whenever circumstances require it; but the minister is only a man, and a man, on questions of this nature, ought to have but one opinion in the course of his life. It is impossible to have better manners than Count Romanzow, or to receive strangers more nobly. I was at his house when the English envoy, Lord Tyrconnel, and Admiral Bentinck were announced, both of them men of remarkably fine appearance: they were the first English who had re-appeared on that continent, from which the tyranny of one man had banished them. After ten years of such fearful struggle, after ten years during which victories and disasters had always found the English true to the compass of their politics' conscience, they returned at last into the country which first emancipated itself from the universal monarchy. Their accent, their simplicity, their fierte, all awakened in the soul that sentiment of truth in all things, which Napoleon has discovered the art of obscuring in the eyes of those who have only read his journals, and listened to his agents. I do not even know if Napoleon's adversaries on the continent, constantly surrounded with a false opinion which never ceases to deafen them, can venture to trust themselves without apprehension to their own feelings. If I can judge of them by myself, I know that frequently, after having heard all the advices of prudence or meanness with which one is overwhelmed in the Bonapartist atmosphere, I scarcely knew what to think of my own opinion; my blood forbid me to renounce it, but my reason was not always sufficient to preserve me from so many sophisms. It was therefore with the most lively emotion that I heard once more the voice of that England, with which we are almost always sure to agree, when we endeavour to deserve our own esteem, and that of persons of integrity. The following day, I was invited by Count Orloff to come and spend the day in the island which bears his name, and which is the most agreeable of all those formed by the Neva; oaks, a rare production in this country, overshadow the garden. The Count and Countess Orloff employ their fortune in receiving strangers with equal facility and magnificence; you are at your ease with them, as in a country retreat, and you enjoy there all the luxury of cities. Count Orloff is one of the most learned noblemen to be met with in Russia, and his love of his country bears a profound character, with which it is impossible to help being affected. The first day I passed at his house, peace had just been proclaimed with England; it was a Sunday; and in his garden, which was on that day opened to all comers, we saw a great number of these long-bearded merchants, who keep up in Russia the costume of the Moujiks, that is to say of the peasants. A number of them collected to hear the delightful band of music of Count Orloff; it gave us the English air of God save the King, which is the song of liberty in a country, of which the monarch is its first guardian. We were all much affected, and applauded this air, which is become national for all Europeans; for there are no longer but two kinds of men in Europe, those who serve tyranny, and those who have learned to hate it. Count Orloff went up to the Russian merchants, and told them that the peace between England and Russia was celebrating; they immediately made the sign of the cross, and thanked heaven that the sea was once more open to them. The isle Orloff is in the centre of all those which the great noblemen of Petersburg, and the emperor and empress themselves, have selected for their residence during summer. Not far from it is the isle Strogonoff, the rich owner of which has brought from Greece antiquities of great value. His house was open every day during his life, and whoever had once been presented might return when they chose; he never invited any one to dinner or supper on a particular day; it was understood that once admitted, you were always welcome; he frequently knew not half the persons who dined at his table: but this luxurious hospitality pleased him like any other kind of magnificence. The same practice prevails in many other houses at Petersburg; it is natural to conclude from that, that what we call in France the pleasures of conversation cannot be there met with: the company is much too numerous to allow a conversation of any interest even to be kept up in it. In the best society the most perfect good manners prevail, but there is neither sufficient information among the nobility, nor sufficient confidence among persons living habitually under the influence of a despotic court and government, to allow them to know any thing of the charms of intimacy. The greater part of the great noblemen of Russia express themselves with so much elegance and propriety, that one frequently deceives one's self at the outset about the degree of wit and acquirements of those with whom you are conversing. The debut is almost always that of a gentleman or lady of fine understanding: but sometimes also, in the long run, you discover nothing but the debut. They are not accustomed in Russia to speak from the bottom of their heart or understanding; they had in former times such fear of their masters, that they have not yet been able to accustom themselves to that wise freedom, for which they are indebted to the character of Alexander. Some Russian gentlemen have tried to distinguish themselves in literature, and have given proofs of considerable talent in this career; but knowledge is not yet sufficiently diffused to create a public judgment formed by individual opinions. The character of the Russians is too passionate to allow them to like ideas in the least degree abstract; it is by facts only that they are amused; they have not yet had time or inclination to reduce facts to general ideas. In addition, every significant idea is always more or less dangerous, in the midst of a court where mutual observation, and more frequently envy are the predominant feelings. The silence of the East is here transformed into amiable words, but which generally never penetrate beyond the surface. One feels pleasure for a moment in this brilliant atmosphere, which is an agreeable dissipation of life; but in the long run no information is acquired in it, no faculties are developed in it, and men who pass their life in this manner never acquire any capacity for study or business. Far otherwise was it with the society of Paris; there we have seen men whose characters have been entirely formed by the lively or serious conversation to which the intercourse between the nobility and men of letters gave birth. CHAPTER 17. The Imperial Family. I had at last the pleasure of seeing that monarch, equally absolute by law and custom, and so moderate from his own disposition. The empress Elizabeth, to whom I was at first presented, appeared to me the tutelary angel of Russia. Her manners are extremely reserved, but what she says is full of life, and it is from the focus of all generous ideas that her sentiments and opinions have derived strength and warmth. While I listened to her, I was affected by something inexpressible, which did not proceed from her grandeur, but from the harmony of her soul; so long was it since I had known an instance of concord between power and virtue. As I was conversing with the empress, the door opened, and the emperor Alexander did me the honor to come and talk to me. What first struck me in him was such an expression of goodness and dignity, that the two qualities appear inseparable, and in him to form only one. I was also very much affected with the noble simplicity with which he entered upon the great interests of Europe, almost among the first words he addressed to me. I have always regarded, as a proof of mediocrity, that apprehension of treating serious questions, with which the best part of the sovereigns of Europe have been inspired; they are afraid to pronounce a word to which any real meaning can be attached. The emperor Alexander on the contrary, conversed with me as statesmen in England would have done, who place their strength in themselves, and not in the barriers with which they are surrounded. The emperor Alexander, whom Napoleon has endeavoured to misrepresent, is a man of remarkable understanding and information, and I do not believe that in the whole extent of his empire he could find a minister better versed than himself in all that belongs to the judgment and direction of public affairs. He did not disguise from me his regret for the admiration to which he had surrendered himself in his intercourse with Napoleon. His grandfather had, in the same way, entertained a great enthusiasm for Frederic II. In these sort of illusions, produced by an extraordinary character, there is always a generous motive, whatever may be the errors that result from it. The emperor Alexander, however, described with great sagacity the effect produced upon him by these conversations with Bonaparte, in which he said the most opposite things, as if one must be astonished at each, without thinking of their being contradictory. He related to me also the lessons a la Machiavel which Napoleon had thought proper to give him: "You see," said he, "I am careful to keep my ministers and generals at variance among themselves, in order that each may reveal to me the faults of the other; I keep up around me a continual jealousy by the manner I treat those who are about me: one day one thinks himself the favorite, the next day another, so that no one is ever certain of my favor." What a vulgar and vicious theory! And will there never arise a man superior to this man, who will demonstrate its inutility? That which is wanting to the sacred cause of morality, is, that it should contribute in a very striking manner to great success in this world; he who feels all the dignity of this cause will sacrifice with pleasure every success, but it is still necessary to teach those presumptuous persons who imagine they discover depth of thinking in the vices of the soul, that if in immorality there is sometimes wit, in virtue there is genius. In obtaining the conviction of the good faith of the emperor Alexander, in his relations with Napoleon, I was at the same time persuaded that he would not imitate the example of the unfortunate sovereigns of Germany, and would sign no peace with him who is equally the enemy of people and kings. A noble soul cannot be twice deceived by the same person. Alexander gives and withdraws his confidence with the greatest reflection. His youth and personal advantages have alone, at the beginning of his reign, made him be suspected of levity; but he is serious, even as much so as a man may be who has known misfortune. Alexander expressed to me his regret at not being a great captain: I replied to this noble modesty, that a sovereign was much more rare than a general, and that the support of the public feelings of his people, by his example, was achieving the greatest victory, and the first of the kind which had ever been gained. The emperor talked to me with enthusiasm of his nation, and of all that it was capable of becoming. He expressed to me the desire, which all the world knows him to entertain, of ameliorating the state of the peasants still subject to slavery. "Sire," said I to him, "your character is a constitution for your empire, and your conscience is the guarantee of it." "Were that even the case," replied he, "I should only be a fortunate accident."* Noble words! The first of the kind, I believe, which an absolute monarch ever pronounced! How many virtues it requires, in a despot, properly to estimate despotism! and how many virtues also, never to abuse it, when the nation which he governs is almost astonished at such signal moderation. At Petersburg especially, the great nobility have less liberality in their principles than the emperor himself. Accustomed to be the absolute masters of their peasants, they wish the monarch, in his turn, to be omnipotent, for the purpose of maintaining the hierarchy of despotism. The state of citizens does not yet exist in Russia; it begins however to be forming; the sons of the clergy, those of the merchants, and some peasants who have obtained of their lords the liberty of becoming artists, may be considered as a third order in the state. The Russian nobility besides bears no resemblance to that of Germany or France; a man becomes noble in Russia, as soon as he obtains rank in the army. No doubt the great families, such as the Narischkins, the Dolgoroukis, the Gallitzins, &c. will always hold the first rank in the empire; but it is not less true that the advantages of the aristocracy belong to men, whom the monarch's pleasure has made noble in a day; and the whole ambition of the citizens is in consequence to have their sons made officers, in order that they may belong to the privileged class. The result of this is, that young men's education is finished at fifteen years of age; they are hurried into the army as soon as possible, and everything else is neglected. This is not the time certainly to blame an order of things, which has produced so noble a resistance; were tranquility restored, it might be truly said, that under civil considerations, there are great deficiencies in the internal administration of Russia. Energy and grandeur exist in the nation; but order and knowledge are still frequently wanting, both in the government, and in the private conduct of individuals. Peter I. by making Russia European, certainly bestowed upon her great advantages; but these advantages he more than counter-balanced by the establishment of a despotism prepared by his father, and consolidated by him; Catherine II. on the contrary tempered the use of absolute power, of which she was not the author. If the political state of Europe should ever be restored to peace: in other words if one man were no longer the dispenser of evil to the world, we should see Alexander solely occupied with the improvement of his country! and in attempting to establish laws which would guarantee to it that happiness, of which the duration is as yet only secured for the life of its present ruler. * (Note by the Editor) * This expression has been already quoted in the third volume of the Considerations on the French Revolution; but it deserves to be repeated. All this, however, it must be remembered, was written at the end of 1812. (End of Note by the Editor.) From the emperor's I went to his respectable mother's, that princess to whom calumny has never been able to impute a sentiment unconnected with the happiness of her husband, her children, or the family of unfortunate persons of whom she is the protectress. I shall relate, farther on, in what manner she governs that empire of charity, which she exercises in the midst of the omnipotent empire of her son. She lives in the palace of the Taurida, and to get to her apartments you have to cross a hall, built by prince Potemkin, of incomparable grandeur; a winter garden occupies a part of it, and you see the trees and plants through the pillars which surround the middle inclosure. Every thing in this residence is colossal; the conceptions of the prince who built it were fantastically gigantic. He had towns built in the Crimea, solely that the empress might see them on her passage; he ordered the assault of a fortress, to please a beautiful woman, the princess Dolgorouki, who had disdained his suit. The favor of his Sovereign mistress created him such as he showed himself; but there is remarkable, notwithstanding, in the characters of most of the great men of Russia, such as Menzikoff, Suwarow, Peter I. himself, and in yet older times Ivan Vasilievitch, something fantastical, violent, and ironical combined. Wit was with them rather an arm than an enjoyment, and it was by the imagination that they were led. Generosity, barbarity, unbridled passions, and religious superstition, all met in the same character. Even now civilization in Russia has not penetrated beyond the surface, even among the great nobility; externally they imitate other nations, but all are Russians at heart, and in that consists their strength and originality, the love of country being next to that of God, the noblest sentiment which men can feel. That country must certainly be exceedingly different from those which surround it to inspire a decided attachment; nations which are confounded with one another by slight shades of difference, or which are divided into several separate states, never devote themselves with real passion to the conventional association to which they have attached the name of country. CHAPTER 18. Manners of the Great Russian Nobility. I went to spend a day at the country seat of prince Narischkin, great chamberlain of the court, an amiable, easy and polished man, but who cannot exist without a fete; it is at his house that you obtain a correct notion of that vivacity in their tastes, which explains the defects and qualities of the Russians. The house of M. de Narischkin is always open, and if there happen to be only twenty persons at his country seat, he begins to be weary of this philosophical retreat. Polite to strangers, always in movement, and yet perfectly capable of the reflection required to stand well at court: greedy of the enjoyments of imagination, but placing these only in things and not in books; impatient every where but at court, witty when it is to his advantage to be so, magnificent rather than ambitious, and seeking in everything for a certain Asiatic grandeur, in which fortune and rank are more conspicuous than personal advantages. His country seat is as agreeable as it is possible for a place of the kind to be, created by the hand of man: all the surrounding country is marshy and barren; so as to make this residence a perfect Oasis. On ascending the terrace, you see the gulph of Finland, and perceive in the distance, the palace which Peter I. built upon its borders; but the space which separates it from the sea and the palace is almost a waste, and the park of M. Narischkin alone charms the eye of the observer. We dined in the house of the Moldavians, that is to say, in a saloon built according to the taste of these people; it was arranged so as to protect from the heat of the sun, a precaution rather needless in Russia. However the imagination is impressed to that degree with the idea that you are living among a people who have only come into the North by accident, that it appears natural to find there the customs of the South, as if the Russians were some day or other to bring to Petersburg the climate of their old country. The table was covered with the fruits of all countries, according to the custom taken from the East, of only letting the fruits appear, while a crowd of servants carried round to each guest the dishes of meat and vegetables they required. We were entertained with a concert of that horn music which is peculiar to Russia, and of which mention has been often made. Of twenty musicians, each plays only one and the same note, every time it returns; each of these men in consequence bears the name of the note which he is employed to execute. When one of them is seen going along, people say: that is the sol, that is the mi, or that is the re of M. Narischkin. The horns go on increasing from rank to rank, and this music has been by some one called, very properly, a living organ. At a distance the effect is very fine: the exactness and the purity of the harmony excite the most noble ideas; but when you come near to these poor performers, who are there like pipes, yielding only one sound, and quite unable to participate by their own emotions in the effect produced, the pleasure dies away: one does not like to see the fine arts transformed into mechanical arts, to be acquired by dint of strength like exercise. Some of the inhabitants of the Ukraine, dressed in scarlet, came afterwards to sing to us some of the airs of their country, which are singularly pleasing: they are sometimes gay and sometimes melancholy, and sometimes both united. These airs sometimes break off abruptly in the midst of the melody, as if the imagination of the people was tired before finishing what at first pleased them, or found it more piquant to suspend the charm at the very moment its influence was greatest. It is thus that the Sultana of the Arabian Nights always breaks off her story, when its interest is at the height. M. Narischkin in the midst of this variety of pleasures, proposed to us to drink a toast to the united arms of the Russians and English, and gave at the same moment a signal to his artillery, which gave almost as loud a salute as that of a sovereign. The inebriety of hope seized all the guests; as for me, I felt myself bathed in tears. Was it possible that a foreign tyrant should reduce me to wish that the French should be beat? I wish, said I then, for the fall of him, who is equally the oppressor of France and Europe; for the true French will triumph if he is repulsed. The English and the Russian guests, and particularly M. Narischkin, approved my idea, and the name of France, formerly like that of Armida in its effects, was once more heard with kindness by the knights of the east, and of the sea, who were going to fight against her. Calrnucks with flat features are still brought up in the houses of the Russian nobility, as if to preserve a specimen of those Tartars who were conquered by the Sclavonians. In the palace of Narischkin there were two or three of these half-savage Calmucks running about. They are agreeable enough in their infancy, but at the age of twenty they lose all the charms of youth: obstinate, though slaves, they amuse their masters by their resistance, like a squirrel fighting with the wires of his cage. It was painful to look at this specimen of the human race debased; I thought I saw, in the midst of all the pomp of luxury, an image of what man may become, when he derives no dignity either from religion or the laws, and this spectacle was calculated to humble the pride which the enjoyments of splendor may inspire. Long carriages for promenade, drawn by the most beautiful horses, conducted us, after dinner, into the park. It was now the end of August, but the sun was pale, the grass of an almost artificial green, because it was only kept up by unremitting attention. The flowers themselves appeared to be an aristocratic enjoyment, so much expense was required to have them. No warbling of birds was heard in the woods, they did not trust themselves to this summer of a moment; neither were any cattle observable in the meadows: one could not dare to give them plants which had required such pains to cultivate. The water scarcely flowed, and only by the help of machines which brought it into the gardens, where the whole of this nature had the air of being a festival decoration, which would disappear when the guests retired. Our caliches stopped in front of a building in the garden, which represented a Tartar camp; there, all the musicians united began a new concert: the noise of horns and cymbals quite intoxicated the ideas. The better to complete this entire banishment of thinking, we had an imitation, during summer, of their sledges, the rapidity of which consoles the Russians for their winter; we rolled upon boards, from the top of a mountain in wood with the quickness of lightning. This amusement charmed the ladies as much as the gentlemen, and allowed them to participate a little in those pleasures of war, which consist in the emotion of danger, and in the animated promptitude of all the movements. Thus passed the time; for every day saw a renewal of what appeared to me to be a fete. With some slight differences, the greater part of the great houses of Petersburg lead the same kind of life: it is impossible, as one may readily see, for any kind of continued conversation to be kept up in it, and learning is of no utility in this kind of society; but where so much is done only from the desire of collecting in one's house a great multitude of persons, entertainments are after all the only means of preventing the ennui which a crowd in the saloons always creates. In the midst of all this noise, is there any room for love? will be asked by the Italian ladies, who scarcely know any other interest in society than the pleasure of seeing the person by whom they wish to be beloved. I passed too short a time at Petersburg to obtain correct ideas of the interior arrangements of families; it appeared to me, however, that on one hand, there was more domestic virtue than was said to exist; but that on the other hand, sentimental love was very rarely known. The customs of Asia, which meet you at every step, prevent the females from interfering with the domestic cares of their establishment: all these are directed by the husband, and the wife only decorates herself with his gifts, and receives the persons whom he invites. The respect for morality is already much greater than it was at Petersburg in the time of those emperors and empresses who depraved opinion by their example. The two present empresses have made those virtues beloved, of which they are themselves the models. In this respect, however, as in a great many others, the principles of morality are not properly fixed in the minds of the Russians. The ascendancy of the master has always been so great over them, that from one reign to another, all maxims upon all subjects may be changed. The Russians, both men and women, generally carry into love their characteristic impetuosity, but their disposition to change makes them also easily renounce the objects of their choice. A certain irregularity in the imagination does not allow them to find happiness in what is durable. The cultivation of the understanding, which multiplies sentiment by poetry and the fine arts, is very rare among the Russians, and with these fantastic and vehement dispositions, love is rather a fete or a delirium than a profound and reflected affection. Good company in Russia is therefore a perpetual vortex, and perhaps the extreme prudence to which a despotic government accustoms people, may be the cause that the Russians are charmed at not being led, by the enticement of conversation, to speak upon subjects which may lead to any consequence whatever. To this reserve, which, under different reigns, has been but too necessary to them, we must attribute the want of truth of which they are accused. The refinements of civilization in all countries alter the sincerity of character, but when a sovereign possesses the unlimited power of exile, imprisonment, sending to Siberia, &c. &c. it is something too strong for human nature. We may meet with men independent enough to disdain favor, but heroism is required to brave persecution, and heroism cannot be an universal quality. None of these reflections, we know, apply to the present government, its head being, as emperor, perfectly just, and as a man, singularly generous. But the subjects preserve the defects of slavery long after the sovereign himself would wish to remove them. We have seen, however, during the continuance of this war, how much virtue has been shown by Russians of all ranks, not even excepting the courtiers. While I was at Petersburg, scarcely any young men were to be seen in company; all had gone to the army. Married men, only sons, noblemen of immense fortunes, were serving in the capacity of simple volunteer, and the sight of their estates and houses ravaged, has never made them think of the losses in any other light than as motives of revenge, but never of capitulating with the enemy. Such qualities more than counterbalance all the abuses, disorders, and misfortunes which an administration still vicious, a civilization yet new, and despotic institutions, may have introduced. CHAPTER 19. Establishments for Public Education.--Institute of Saint Catherine. We went to see the cabinet of natural history, which is remarkable by the productions of Siberia which it contains. The furs of that country have excited the cupidity of the Russians, as the Mexican gold mines did that of the Spaniards. There was a time in Russia, when the current money consisted of sable and squirrel skins, so universal was the desire of being provided with the means of guarding against the cold. The most curious thing in the museum at Petersburg, is a rich collection of bones of antediluvian animals, and particularly the remains of a gigantic Mammoth, which have been found almost whole among the ices of Siberia. It appears from geological observations, that the world has a much older history than that which we know: infinity is fearful in all things. At present, the inhabitants, and even the animals of this extremity of the inhabited globe are almost penetrated with the cold, which makes nature expire, a few leagues beyond their country; the color of the animals is confounded with that of the snow, and the Dearth seems to be lost in the ices and fogs which terminate this lower creation. I was struck with the countenances of the inhabitants of Kamstchatka, which are perfectly imitated in the museum at Petersburg. The priests of that country, called Shamanes, are a kind of improvisators; they wear, over their tunick of bark, a sort of steel net, to which some pieces of iron are attached, the noise of which is very great when the improvisator is agitated; he has moments of inspiration which a good deal resemble nervous attacks, and it is rather by sorcery, than talent, that he makes an impression on the people. The imagination, in such dreary countries, is scarcely remarkable but by fear, and the earth herself appears to repel man by the terror with which she inspires him. I afterwards saw the citadel, in the circumference of which is the church where the coffins of all the sovereigns, from the time of Peter the Great, are deposited: these coffins are not shut up in monuments; they are exposed in the same way as they were on the day of their funeral, and one might fancy one's self quite close to these corpses, from which a single board appears to separate us. When Paul I. came to the throne, he caused the remains of his father, Peter I. to be crowned, who not having received that honor during his life, could not be placed in the citadel. By the orders of Paul I. the ceremonial of interment for both his father and mother was recommenced. Both were exposed afresh: four chamberlains once more kept guard over the bodies, as if they had only died the day before; and the two coffins are now placed by the side of each other, compelled to live in peace under the empire of death. Among the sovereigns who have stayed the despotic power transmitted to them by Peter I. there are several whom a bloody conspiracy has cast from the throne. The same courtiers, who have not the strength to tell their master the least truth, know how to conspire against him, and the deepest dissimulation necessarily accompanies this kind of political revolution; for they must load, with the appearance of respect, the person whom they wish to assassinate. And yet, what would become of a country governed despotically, if a lawless tyrant had not to dread the edge of the poniard? Horrible alternative, and which is sufficient to show the nature of the institutions where crime must be reckoned as the balance of power. I paid homage to Catherine II. by going to her country residence, Czarskozelo. This palace and garden are arranged with great art and magnificence; but the air was already very cold, although we Were only at the first of September, and it was a singular contrast to see the flowers of the South agitated by the winds of the North. All the traits which have been collected of Catherine II. penetrate one with admiration for her as a sovereign; and I know not whether the Russians are not more indebted to her than to Peter I. for that fortunate persuasion of their invincibility which has so much contributed to their victories, The charm of a female tempered the action of power, and mingled chivalrous gallantry with the successes, the homage of which was paid to her. Catherine II. had, in the highest degree, the good sense of government; a brilliant understanding than hers would have less resembled genius, and her lofty reason inspired profound respect in the Russians, who distrust their own imagination, and wish to have it directed with wisdom. Close to Czarskozelo is the palace of Paul I., a charming residence, as the empress dowager and her daughters have there placed the chefs-d'oeuvrefc of their talents and good taste. This place reminds us of that admirable mother and her daughters, whom nothing has been able to turn aside from their domestic virtues. I allowed myself to indulge in the pleasure excited by the novel objects of my daily visits, and I know not how, I had quite forgotten the war on which the fate of Europe depended; the pleasure I had in hearing expressed by all the world the sentiments which I had so long stifled in my soul, was so strong, that it appeared to me there was nothing more to dread, and that such truths were omnipotent as soon as they were known. Nevertheless a succession of reverses had taken place, without the public being informed of them. A man of wit said that all was mystery at Petersburg, although nothing was a secret; and in fact the truth is discovered in the end; but the habit of silence is such among the Russian courtiers, that they dissemble the day before what will be notorious the next, and are always unwilling to reveal what they know. A stranger told me that Smolensk was taken and Moscow in the greatest danger. Discouragement immediately seized me. I fancied that I already saw a repetition of the deplorable history of the Austrian and Prussian treaties of peace, the result of the conquest of their capitals. This was the third time the same game had been played, and it might again succeed. I did not perceive the public spirit; the apparent inconstancy of the impressions of the Russians prevented me from observing it. Despondency had frozen all minds, and I was ignorant, that with these men of vehement impressions, this despondency is the forerunner of a dreadful awakening. In the same way, you remark in the common people, an inconceivable idleness up to the very moment when their activity is roused; then it knows no obstacle, dreads no danger, and seems to triumph equally over the elements and men. I had understood that the internal administration, that of war as well as of justice, frequently fell into the most venal hands, and that by the dilapidations which the subaltern agents allowed themselves, it was impossible to form any just idea either of the number of troops, or of the measures taken to provision them; for lying and theft are inseparable, and in a country of such recent civilization the intermediate class have neither the simplicity of the peasantry, nor the grandeur of the boyars; and no public opinion yet exists to keep in check this third class, whose existence is so recent, and which has lost the naivete of popular faith without having acquired the point of honor. A display of jealous feeling was also remarked between the military commanders. It is in the very nature of a despotic government to create, even in spite of itself, jealousy in those who surround it: the will of one man being able to change entirely the fortune of every individual, fear and hope have too much scope not to be constantly agitating this jealousy, which is also very much excited by another feeling, the hatred of foreigners. The general who commanded the Russian army, General Barclay de Tolly, although born on the territories of the empire, was not of the pure Sclavonian race, and that was enough to make him be considered incapable of leading the Russians to victory: he had, besides, turned his distinguished talents towards systems of encampment, positions, and manoeuvres, while the military art, which best suits the Russians, is attack. To make them fall back, even from a wise and well reasoned calculation, is to cool in them that impetuosity from which they derive all their strength. The prospects of the campaign were therefore the most inauspicious possible, and the silence which was maintained on that account was still more alarming. The English give in their public papers the most exact account, man by man, of the wounded, prisoners and killed in each action; noble candour of a government which is equally sincere towards the nation and its monarch, recognizing in both the same right to have a knowledge of what concerns the nation. I walked about with deep melancholy in that beautiful city of Petersburg which might become the prey of the conqueror. When I returned in the evening from the islands, and saw the gilded point of the citadel which seemed to spout out in the air like a ray of fire, while the Neva reflected the marble quays and the palaces which surround it, I represented to myself all these wonders faded by the arrogance of a man who would come to say, like Satan on the top of a mountain, "The kingdoms of the earth are mine." All that was beautiful and good at Petersburg appeared to me in the presence of approaching destruction, and I could not enjoy them without having these painful ideas constantly pursuing me. I went to see the establishments for education, founded by the empress, and there, even more than in the palaces, my anxiety was redoubled; for the breath of Bonaparte's tyranny is sufficient, if it approach institutions tending to the improvement of the human race, to alter their purity. The institute of St. Catherine is formed of two houses, each containing two hundred and fifty young ladies of the nobility and citizens; they are educated under the inspection of the empress, with a degree of care that even exceeds what a rich family would pay to its own children. Order and elegance are remarkable in the most minute details of this institute, and the sentiment of the purest religion and morality there presides over all that the fine arts can develope. The Russian females have so much natural grace, that on entering the hall where all the young ladies saluted us, I did not observe one who did not give to this simple action all the politeness and modesty which it was capable of expressing. They were invited to exhibit us the different kinds of talent which distinguished them, and one of them, who knew by heart pieces of the best French authors, repeated to me several of the most eloquent pages of my father's Course of Religious Morals. This delicate attention probably came from the empress herself. I felt the most lively emotion in hearing that language uttered, which for so many years had had no asylum but in my heart. Beyond the empire of Bonaparte, in all countries posterity commences, and justice is shown towards those who even in the tomb, have felt the attack of his imperial calumnies. The young ladies of the institute of St. Catherine, before sitting down to table, sung psalms in chorus: this great number of voices, so pure and sweet, occasioned me an emotion of tender feeling mingled with bitterness. What would war do, in the midst of such peaceable establishments? Where could these doves fly to, from the arms of the conqueror? After this meal, the young ladies assembled in a superb hall, where they all danced together. There was nothing striking in their features as to beauty, but their gracefulness was extraordinary; these were daughters of the East, with all the decency which Christian manners have introduced among women. They first executed an old dance to the tune of Long live Henry the Fourth, Long live this valiant King! What a distance there was between the times which this tune reminded one of, and the present period! Two little chubby girls of ten years old finished the ballet by the Russian step: this dance sometimes assumes the voluptuous character of love, but executed by children, the innocence of that age was mingled with the national originality. It is impossible to paint: the interest inspired by these amiable talents, cultivated by the delicate and generous hand of a female and a sovereign. An establishment for the deaf and dumb, and another for the blind, are equally under the inspection of the empress. The emperor, on his side, pays great attention to the school of cadets, directed by a man of very superior understanding, General Klinger. All these establishments are truly useful, but they might be reproached with being too splendid. At least it would be desirable to found in different parts of the empire, not schools so superior, but establishments which would communicate elementary instruction to the people. Every thing has commenced in Russia by luxury, and the building has, it may be said, preceded the foundation. There are only two great cities in Russia, Petersburg and Moscow; the others scarcely deserve to be mentioned; they are besides separated at very great distances: even the chateaux of the nobility are at such distances from each other, that it is with difficulty the proprietors can communicate with each other. Finally, the inhabitants are so dispersed in this empire, that the knowledge of some can hardly be of use to others. The peasants can only reckon by means of a calculating machine, and the clerks of the post themselves follow the same method. The Greek popes have much less knowledge than the Catholic curates, or the Protestant ministers; so that the clergy in Russia are really not fit to instruct the people, as in the other countries of Europe. The great bond of the nation is in religion and patriotism; but there is in it no focus of knowledge, the rays of which might spread over all parts of the empire, and the two capitals have not yet learned to communicate to the provinces what they have collected in literature and the fine arts. If this country could have remained at peace, it would have experienced all sorts of improvement under the beneficent reign of Alexander. But who knows if the virtues which this war has developed, may not be exactly those which are likely to regenerate nations? The Russians have not yet had, up to the present time, men of genius but for the military career; in all other arts they are only imitators; printing, however, has not been introduced among them more than one hundred and twenty years. The other nations of Europe have become civilized almost simultaneously, and have been able to mingle their natural genius with acquired knowledge; with the Russians this mixture has not yet operated. In the same manner as we see two rivers after their junction, flow in the same channel without confounding their waters, in the same manner nature and civilization are united among the Russians without identifying the one with the other: and according to circumstances the same man at one time presents himself to you as a European who seems only to exist in social forms, and at another time as a Sclavonian who only listens to the most furious passions. Genius will come to them in the fine arts, and particularly in literature, when they shall have found out the means of infusing their real disposition into language, as they show it in action. I witnessed the performance of a Russian tragedy, the subject of which was the deliverance of the Muscovites, when they drove back the Tartars beyond Casan. The prince of Smolensko appeared in the ancient costume of the boyars, and the Tartar army was called the golden horde. This piece was written almost entirely according to the rules of the French drama; the rhythm of the verses, the declamation, and the division of the scenes, was entirely French; one situation only was peculiar to Russian manners, and that was the profound terror which the dread of her father's curse has inspired in a young female. Paternal authority is almost as strong among the Russians as among the Chinese, and it is always among the people that we must seek for the germ of national character. The good company of all countries resembles each other, and nothing is so unfit as that elegant world to furnish subjects for tragedy. Among all those which the history of Russia presents, there is one by which I was particularly struck. Ivan the Terrible, already old, was besieging Novorogod. The boyars seeing him very much enfeebled, asked him if he would not give the command of the assault to his son. His rage at this proposition was so great, that nothing could appease him; his son prostrated himself at his feet, but he repulsed him with a blow of such violence, that two days after the unfortunate prince died of it. The father, then reduced to despair, became equally indifferent to war and to power, and only survived his son a few months. This revolt of an old despot against the progress of time has in it something grand and solemn, and the melting tenderness which succeeds to the paroxysm of rage in that ferocious soul, represents man as he comes from the hand of nature, now irritated by selfishness, and again restrained by affection. A law of Russia inflicted the same punishment on the person who lamed a man in the arm as on one who killed him. In fact, man in Russia is principally valuable by his military strength; all other kinds of energy are adapted to manners and institutions which the present state of Russia has not yet developed. The females at Petersburg, however, seemed to be penetrated with that patriotic honor which constitutes the moral power of a state. The princess Dolgoronki, the baroness Strogonoff, and several others equally of the first rank, already knew that a part of their fortunes had suffered greatly by the ravaging of the province of Smolensko, and they appeared not to think of it otherwise than to encourage their equals to sacrifice every thing like them. The princess Dolgorouki related to me that an old long-bearded Russian, seated on an eminence overlooking Smoleusko, thus, in tears, addressed his little grandson, whom he held upon his knees: "Formerly, my child, the Russians went to gain victories at the extremity of Europe; now, strangers come to attack them in their own homes." The grief of this old man was not vain, and we shall soon see how dearly his tears have been purchased. CHAPTER 20. Departure for Sweden.--Passage through Finland. The emperor quitted Petersburg, and I learned that he was gone to Abo, where he was to meet General Bernadotte, Prince Royal of Sweden. This news left no farther doubt about the determination of that prince to take part in the present war, and nothing could be more important at that moment for the salvation of Russia, and consequently for that of Europe. We shall see the influence of it developed in the sequel of this narrative. The news of the entrance of the French into Smolensko arrived during the conferences of the prince of Sweden with the emperor of Russia; and it was there that Alexander contracted the engagement with himself and the Prince Royal, his ally, never to sign a treaty of peace. "Should Petersburg be taken," said he, "I will retire into Siberia. I will there resume our ancient customs, and like our long-bearded ancestors, we will return anew to conquer the Empire." "This resolution will liberate Europe," exclaimed the Prince Royal, and his prediction begins to be accomplishing. I saw the Emperor Alexander a second time upon his return from Abo, and the conversation I had the honor of holding with him, satisfied me to that degree of the firmness of his determination, that in spite of the capture of Moscow, and all the reports which followed it, I firmly believed that he would never yield. He was so good as to tell me, that after the capture of Smolensko, Marshal Berthier had written to the Russian commander in chief respecting some military matters, and terminated his letter by saying that the Emperor Napoleon always preserved the tenderest friendship for the Emperor Alexander, a stale mystification which the emperor of Russia received as it deserved. Napoleon had given him some lessons in politics, and lessons in war, abandoning himself in the first to the quackery of vice, and in the second to the pleasure of exhibiting a disdainful carelessness. He was deceived in the Emperor Alexander; he had mistaken the nobleness of his character for dupery; he had not been able to perceive that if the emperor of Russia had allowed himself to go too far in his enthusiasm for him, it was because he believed him a partizan of the first principles of the French revolution, which agreed with his own opinions; but never had Alexander the idea of associating with Napoleon to reduce Europe to slavery. Napoleon thought in that, as well as in all other circumstances, to succeed in blinding a man by a false representation of his interest; but he encountered conscience, and his calculations were entirely baffled; for that is an element, of the strength of which he knows nothing, and which he never allows to enter into his combinations. Although General Barclay de Tolly was a military man of great reputation, yet as he had met with reverses at the beginning of the campaign, the general opinion designated as his successor, a general of great renown, Prince Kutusow; he took the command fifteen days before the entry of the French into Moscow, but he got to the army only six days before the great battle which took place almost at the gates of that city, at Borodino. I went to see him the day before his departure; he was an old man of the most graceful manners, and lively physiognomy, although he had lost an eye by one of the numerous wounds he had received in the course of a fifty years' service. On looking at him, I was afraid that he had not sufficient strength to struggle with the rough young men who were pouncing upon Russia from all corners of Europe: but the Russian courtiers at Petersburg become Tartars at the army: and we have seen by Suwarow that neither age nor honors can enervate their physical and moral energy. I was moved at taking leave of this illustrious Marshal Kutusow; I knew not whether I was embracing a conqueror or a martyr, but I saw that he had the fullest sense of the grandeur of the cause in which he was employed. It was for the defence, or rather for the restoration of all the moral virtues which man owes to Christianity, of all the dignity he derives from God, of all the independence which he is allowed by nature; it was for the rescuing of all these advantages from the clutches of one man, for the French are as little to be accused as the Germans and Italians who followed his train, of the crimes of his armies. Before his departure, Marshal Kutusow went to offer up prayers in the church of Our Lady of Casan, and all the people who followed his steps, called out to him to be the saviour of Russia. What a moment for a mortal being! His age gave him no hope of surviving the fatigues of the campaign; but there are moments when man has a wish to die for the satisfaction of his soul. Certain of the generous opinions and of the noble conduct of the Prince of Sweden, I was more than ever confirmed in the resolution of going to Stockholm, previous to embarking for England; towards the end of September I quitted Petersburg to repair to Sweden through Finland. My new friends, those whom a community of sentiment had brought about me, came to bid me adieu; Sir Robert Wilson, who seeks every where an opportunity of fighting, and inflaming his friends by his spirit: M. de Stein, a man of antique character, who only lived in the hope of seeing the deliverance of his country; the Spanish envoy; and the English minister, Lord Tyrconnel; the witty Admiral Bentinck; Alexis de Noailles, the only French emigrant from the imperial tyranny, the only one who was there, like me, to bear witness for France; Colonel Dornberg, that intrepid Hessian whom nothing has turned from the object of his pursuit; and several Russians, whose names have been since celebrated by their exploits. Never was the fate of the world exposed to greater dangers; no one dared to say so, but all knew it: I only, as a female, was not exposed to it; but I might reckon what I had suffered as something. I knew not in bidding adieu to these worthy knights of the human race, which of them I should ever see again, and already two of them are no longer in existence. When the passions of man rouse man against his fellows, when nations attack each other with fury, we recognize, with sorrow, human destiny in the miseries of humanity; but when a single being, similar to the idols of the Laplanders, to whom the incense of fear is offered up, spreads misery over the earth in torrents, we experience a sort of superstitious fear which leads us to consider all honorable persons as his victims. On entering into Finland, every thing indicates that you have passed into another country, and that you have to do with a very different race from the Sclavonians. The Finns are said to come immediately from the North of Asia; their language also is said to have no resemblance to the Swedish, which is an intermediate one between the English and the German. The countenances of the Finns, however, are generally perfectly German: their fair hair, and white complexions, bear no resemblance to the vivacity of the Russian countenance; but their manners are also much milder; the common people have a settled probity, the result of protestant instruction, and purity of manners. On Sundays, the young women are seen returning from sermon on horseback, and the young men following them. You will frequently receive hospitality from the pastors of Finland, who regard it as their duty to give a lodging to travellers, and nothing can be more pure or delightful than the reception you meet with in those families; there are scarcely any noblemens' seats in Finland, so that the pastors are generally the most important personages of the country. In several Finnish songs, the young girls offer to their lovers to sacrifice the residence of the pastor, even if it was offered to them to share. This reminds me of the expression of a young shepherd, "If I was a king, I would keep my sheep on horseback." The imagination itself scarcely goes beyond what is known. The aspect of nature is very different in Finland to what it is in Russia; in place of the marshes and plains which surround St. Petersburg, you find rocks, almost mountains, and forests: but after a time, these mountains, and those forests, composed of the same trees, the fir and the birch, become monotonous. The enormous blocks of granite which are seen scattered through the country, and on the borders of the high roads, give the country an air of vigor; but there is very little life around these great bones of the earth, and vegetation begins to decrease from the latitude of Finland to the last degree of the animated world. We passed through a forest half consumed by fire; the north winds which add to the force of the flames, render these fires very frequent, both in the towns and in the country. Man has in all ways great difficulty in maintaining the struggle with nature in these frozen climates. You meet with few towns in Finland, and those few are very thinly peopled. There is no centre, no emulation, nothing to say, and very little to do, in a northern Swedish or Russian province, and during eight months of the year, the whole of animated nature is asleep. The Emperor Alexander possessed himself of Finland after the treaty of Tilsit, and at a period when the deranged intellects of the monarch who then reigned in Sweden, Gustavus IV., rendered him incapable of defending his country. The moral character of this prince was very estimable, but from his infancy, he had been sensible himself that he could not hold the reins of government. The Swedes fought in Finland with the greatest courage; but without a warlike chief on the throne, a nation which is not numerous cannot triumph over a powerful enemy. The Emperor Alexander became master of Finland by conquest, and by treaties founded on force; but we must do him the justice to say, that he treated this new province very well, and respected the liberties she enjoyed. He allowed the Finns all their privileges relative to the raising of taxes and men; he sent very generous assistance to the towns which had been burnt, and his favors compensated to a certain extent what the Finns possessed as rights, if free men can ever accede voluntarily to that sort of exchange. Finally, one of the prevailing ideas of the nineteenth century, natural boundaries, rendered Finland as necessary to Russia, as Norway to Sweden; and it must be admitted as a truth, that wherever these natural limits have not existed, they have been the source of perpetual wars. I embarked at Abo, the capital of Finland. There is an university in that city, and they make some attempts in it to cultivate the intellect: but the vicinity of the bears and wolves during the winter is so close, that all ideas are absorbed in the necessity of ensuring a tolerable physical existence; and the difficulty which is felt in obtaining that in the countries of the north, consumes at great part of the time which' is elsewhere consecrated to the enjoyment of the intellectual arts. As some compensation, however, it may be said that the very difficulties with which nature surrounds men give greater firmness to their character, and prevent the admission into their mind of all the disorders occasioned by idleness. I could not help, however every moment regretting those rays of the South which had penetrated to my very soul. The mythological ideas of the inhabitants of the North are constantly representing to them ghosts and phantoms; day is there equally favorable to apparitions as night; something pale and cloudy seems to summon the dead to return to the earth, to breathe the cold air, as the tomb with which the living are surrounded. In these countries the two extremities are generally more conspicuous than the intermediate ones; where men are entirely occupied with conquering their existence from nature, mental labors very easily become mystical, because man draws entirely from himself, and is in no degree inspired by external objects. Since I have been so cruelly persecuted by the Emperor, I have lost all kind of confidence in destiny; I have however a stronger belief in the protection of providence, but it is not in the form of happiness on this earth. The result is, that all resolutions terrify me, and yet exile obliges me frequently to adopt some. I dreaded the sea, although every one said, all the world makes this passage, and no harm happens to any one. Such is the language which encourages almost all travellers: but the imagination does not allow itself to be chained by this kind of consolation, and that abyss, from which so slight an obstacle separates you, is always tormenting to the mind. Mr. Schlegel saw the terror I felt about the frail vessel which was to carry us to Stockholm. He showed me, near Abo, the prison in which one of the most unfortunate kings of Sweden, Eric XIV. had been confined some time before he died in another prison near Gripsholm. "If you were confined there," he said to me, "how much would you envy the passage of this sea, which at present so terrifies you." This just reflection speedily gave another turn to my ideas, and the first days of our voyage were sufficiently pleasant. We passed between the islands, and although there was more danger close to the land than in the open sea, one never feels the same terror which the sight of the waves appearing to touch the sky makes one experience. I made them show me the land in the horizon, as far as I could perceive it; infinity is as fearful to the sight as it is pleasant to the soul. We passed by the isle of Aland, where the plenipotentiaries of Peter I. and Charles XII. negociated a peace, and endeavored to fix boundaries to their ambition in this frozen part of the world, which the blood of their subjects alone had been able to thaw for a moment. We hoped to reach Stockholm the following day, but a decidedly contrary wind obliged us to cast anchor by the side of an island entirely covered with rocks interspersed with trees, which hardly grew higher than the stones which surrounded them. We hastened, however, to take a walk on this island, in order to feel the earth under our feet. I have always been very subject to ennui, and far from knowing how to occupy myself at those moments of entire leisure which seem destined for study. Here the manuscript breaks off. After a passage which was not without danger, my mother was landed safely at Stockholm. She was received in Sweden with the greatest kindness, and spent eight months there, and it was there she wrote the present journal. Shortly after, she departed for London, and there published her work on Germany, which the Imperial police had suppressed. But her health, already cruelly affected by Bonaparte's persecutions, having suffered from the fatigues of a long voyage, she felt herself obliged without farther delay to undertake the history of the political life of her father, and to adjourn to a future period all other labors, until she had finished that which her filial affection made her regard as a duty. She then conceived the plan of her Considerations on the French Revolution. That work even she was not spared to finish, and the manuscript of her Ten Years' Exile remained in her portfolio in the state in which I now publish it. (End of Note by the Editor.) 
40307	----	THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [Illustration: Photo of William James.] FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE BOUGHTON, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 9, 1907] THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES EDITED BY HIS SON HENRY JAMES IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I [Illustration: colophon] THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HENRY JAMES _To my Mother, gallant and devoted ally of my Father's most arduous and happy years, this collection of his letters is dedicated._ PREFACE WHETHER William James was compressing his correspondence into brief messages, or allowing it to expand into copious letters, he could not write a page that was not free, animated, and characteristic. Many of his correspondents preserved his letters, and examination of them soon showed that it would be possible to make a selection which should not only contain certain letters that clearly deserved to be published because of their readable quality alone, but should also include letters that were biographical in the best sense. For in the case of a man like James the biographical question to be answered is not, as with a man of affairs: How can his actions be explained? but rather: What manner of being was he? What were his background and education? and, above all, What were his temperament and the bias of his mind? What native instincts, preferences, and limitations of view did he bring with him to his business of reading the riddle of the Universe? His own informal utterances throw the strongest light on such questions. In these volumes I have attempted to make such a selection. The task has been simplified by the nature of the material, in which the most interesting letters were often found, naturally enough, to include the most vivid elements of which a picture could be composed. I have added such notes as seemed necessary in the interest of clearness; but I have tried to leave the reader to his own conclusions. The work was begun in 1913, but had to be laid aside; and I should regret the delay in completing it even more than I do if it were not that very interesting letters have come to light during the last three years. James was a great reader of biographies himself, and pointed again and again to the folly of judging a man's ideas by minute logical and textual examinations, without apprehending his mental attitude sympathetically. He was well aware that every man's philosophy is biased by his feelings, and is not due to purely rational processes. He was quite incapable himself of the cool kind of abstraction that comes from indifference about the issue. Life spoke to him in even more ways than to most men, and he responded to its superabundant confusion with passion and insatiable curiosity. His spiritual development was a matter of intense personal experience. So students of his books may even find that this collection of informal and intimate utterances helps them to understand James as a philosopher and psychologist. I have not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic. Such documents belong in a study of James's philosophy, or in a history of its origin and influence. However interesting they might be to certain readers, their appropriate place is not here. A good deal of biographical information about William James, his brother Henry, and their father has already been given to the public; but unfortunately it is scattered, and much of it is cast in a form which calls for interpretation or amendment. The elder Henry James left an autobiographical fragment which was published in a volume of his "Literary Remains," but it was composed purely as a religious record. He wrote it in the third person, as if it were the life of one "Stephen Dewhurst," and did not try to give a circumstantial report of his youth or ancestry. Later, his son Henry wrote two volumes of early reminiscences in his turn. In "A Small Boy and Others" and "Notes of a Son and Brother" he reproduced the atmosphere of a household of which he was the last survivor, and adumbrated the figures of Henry James, Senior, and of certain other members of his family with infinite subtlety at every turn of the page. But he too wrote without much attention to particular facts or the sequence of events, and his two volumes were incomplete and occasionally inaccurate with respect to such details. Accordingly I have thought it advisable to restate parts of the family record, even though the restatement involves some repetition. Finally, I should explain that the letters have been reproduced _verbatim_, though not _literatim_, except for superscriptions, which have often been simplified. As respects spelling and punctuation, the manuscripts are not consistent. James wrote rapidly, used abbreviations, occasionally "simplified" his spelling, and was inclined to use capital letters only for emphasis. Thus he often followed the French custom of writing adjectives derived from proper names with small letters--_e.g._ french literature, european affairs. But when he wrote for publication he was too considerate of his reader's attention to distract it with such petty irregularities; therefore unimportant peculiarities of orthography have generally not been reproduced in this book. On the other hand, the phraseology of the manuscripts, even where grammatically incomplete, has been kept. Verbal changes have not been made except where it was clear that there had been a slip of the pen, and clear what had been intended. It is obvious that rhetorical laxities are to be expected in letters written as these were. No editor who has attempted to "improve away" such defects has ever deserved to be thanked. Acknowledgments are due, first of all, to the correspondents who have generously supplied letters. Several who were most generous and to whom I am most indebted have, alas! passed beyond the reach of thanks. I wish particularly to record my gratitude here to correspondents too numerous to be named who have furnished letters that are not included. Such material, though omitted from the book, has been informing and helpful to the Editor. One example may be cited--the copious correspondence with Mrs. James which covers the period of every briefest separation; but extracts from this have been used only when other letters failed. From Dr. Dickinson S. Miller, from Professor R. B. Perry, from my mother, from my brother William, and from my wife, all of whom have seen the material at different stages of its preparation, I have received many helpful suggestions, and I gratefully acknowledge my special debt to them. President Eliot, Dr. Miller, and Professor G. H. Palmer were, each, so kind as to send me memoranda of their impressions and recollections. I have embodied parts of the memoranda of the first two in my notes; and have quoted from Professor Palmer's minute--about to appear in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine." For all information about William James's Barber ancestry I am indebted to the genealogical investigations of Mrs. Russell Hastings. Special acknowledgments are due to Mr. George B. Ives, who has prepared the topical index. Finally, I shall be grateful to anyone who will, at any time, advise me of the whereabouts of any letters which I have not already had an opportunity to examine. H. J. _August, 1920._ CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION 1-30 _Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain Personal Traits._ II. 1861-1864 31-52 _Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence Scientific School._ LETTERS:-- To his Family 33 To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet) 37 To his Family 40 To Katharine James Prince 43 To his Mother 45 To his Sister 49 III. 1864-1866 53-70 _The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz to the Amazon._ LETTERS:-- To his Mother 56 To his Parents 57 To his Father 60 To his Father 64 To his Parents 67 IV. 1866-1867 71-83 _Medical Studies at Harvard._ LETTERS:-- To Thomas W. Ward 73 To Thomas W. Ward 76 To his Sister 79 To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 82 V. 1867-1868 84-139 _Eighteen Months in Germany._ LETTERS:-- To his Parents 86 To his Mother 92 To his Father 95 To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 98 To Henry James 103 To his Sister 108 To his Sister 115 To Thomas W. Ward 118 To Thomas W. Ward 119 To Henry P. Bowditch 120 To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 124 To Thomas W. Ward 127 To his Father 133 To Henry James 136 To his Father 137 VI. 1869-1872 140-164 _Invalidism in Cambridge._ LETTERS:-- To Henry P. Bowditch 149 To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr. 151 To Thomas W. Ward 152 To Henry P. Bowditch 153 To Miss Mary Tappan 156 To Henry James 157 To Henry P. Bowditch 158 To Henry P. Bowditch 161 To Charles Renouvier 163 VII. 1872-1878 165-191 _First Years of Teaching._ LETTERS:-- To Henry James 167 [Henry James, Senior, to Henry James] 169 To his Family 172 To his Sister 174 To his Sister 175 To his Sister 177 To Henry James 180 To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 181 To Henry James 182 To Henry James 183 To Charles Renouvier 186 VIII. 1878-1883 192-222 _Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European Colleagues--Death of his Parents._ LETTERS:-- To Francis J. Child 196 To Miss Frances R. Morse 197 To Mrs. James 199 To Josiah Royce 202 To Josiah Royce 204 To Charles Renouvier 206 To Charles Renouvier 207 To Mrs. James 210 To Mrs. James 211 To Henry James 217 To his Father 218 To Mrs. James 221 IX. 1883-1890 223-299 _Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress of 1889._ LETTERS:-- To Charles Renouvier 229 To Henry L. Higginson 233 To Henry P. Bowditch 234 To Thomas Davidson 235 To G. H. Howison 237 To E. L. Godkin 240 To E. L. Godkin 240 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 241 To Henry James 242 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 243 To Carl Stumpf 247 To Henry James 250 To W. D. Howells 253 To G. Croom Robertson 254 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 256 To his Sister 259 To Carl Stumpf 262 To Henry P. Bowditch 267 To Henry James 267 To his Sister 269 To Henry James 273 To Charles Waldstein 274 To his Son Henry 275 To his Son Henry 276 To his Son William 278 To Henry James 279 To Miss Grace Norton 282 To G. Croom Robertson 283 To Henry James 283 To E. L. Godkin 283 To Henry James 285 To Mrs. James 287 To Miss Grace Norton 291 To Charles Eliot Norton 292 To Henry Holt 293 To Mrs. James 294 To Henry James 296 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 296 To W. D. Howells 298 X. 1890-1893 300-348 _The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A Sabbatical Year in Europe._ LETTERS:-- To Mrs. Henry Whitman 303 To G. H. Howison 304 To F. W. H. Myers 305 To W. D. Howells 307 To W. D. Howells 307 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 308 To his Sister 309 To Hugo Münsterberg 312 To Henry Holt 314 To Henry James 314 To Miss Grace Ashburner 315 To Henry James 317 To Miss Mary Tappan 319 To Miss Grace Ashburner 320 To Theodore Flournoy 323 To William M. Salter 326 To James J. Putnam 326 To Miss Grace Ashburner 328 To Josiah Royce 331 To Miss Grace Norton 335 To Miss Margaret Gibbens 338 To Francis Boott 340 To Henry James 342 To François Pillon 343 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 343 To Dickinson S. Miller 344 To Henry James 346 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS William James _Frontispiece_ Henry James, Sr., and his Wife 8 William James at eighteen 20 Pencil Sketch: _A Sleeping Dog_ 52 Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book: _A Turtle_ 66 Pencil Sketch: _Retreating Figure of a Man_ 83 William James at twenty-five 86 Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book 108 Pencil Sketch: _An Elephant_ 139 Francis James Child 291 DATES AND FAMILY NAMES 1842. January 11. Born in New York. 1857-58. At School in Boulogne. 1859-60. In Geneva. 1860-61. Studied painting under William M. Hunt in Newport. 1861. Entered the Lawrence Scientific School. 1863. Entered the Harvard Medical School. 1865-66. Assistant under Louis Agassiz on the Amazon. 1867-68. Studied medicine in Germany. 1869. M.D. Harvard. 1873-76. Instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in Harvard College. 1875. Began to give instruction in Psychology. 1876. Assistant Professor of Physiology. 1878. Married. Undertook to write a treatise on Psychology. 1880. Assistant Professor of Philosophy. 1882-83. Spent several months visiting European universities and colleagues. 1885. Professor of Philosophy. (Between 1889 and 1897 his title was Professor of Psychology.) 1890. "Principles of Psychology" appeared. 1892-93. European travel. 1897. Published "The Will to Believe and other Essays on Popular Philosophy." 1899. Published "Talks to Teachers," etc. 1899-1902. Broke down in health. Two years in Europe. 1901-1902. Gifford Lectures. "The Varieties of Religious Experience." 1906. Acting Professor for half-term at Stanford University. (Interrupted by San Francisco earthquake.) 1906. Lowell Institute lectures, subsequently published as "Pragmatism." 1907. Resigned all active duties at Harvard. 1908. Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford; subsequently published as "A Pluralistic Universe." 1910. August 26. Died at Chocorua, N.H. (See Appendix in volume II for a full list of books by William James, with their dates.) William James was the eldest of five children. His brothers and sister, with their dates, were: Henry (referred to as "Harry"), 1843-1916; Garth Wilkinson (referred to as "Wilky"), 1845-1883; Robertson (referred to as "Bob" and "Bobby"), 1846-1910; Alice, 1848-1892. He had five children. Their dates and the names by which they are referred to in the letters are: Henry ("Harry"), 1879; William ("Billy"), 1882; Hermann, 1884-1885; Margaret Mary ("Peggy," "Peg"), 1887; Alexander Robertson ("Tweedie," "François"), 1890. THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES I INTRODUCTION _Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain Personal Traits_ THE ancestors of William James, with the possible exception of one pair of great-great-grandparents, all came to America from Scotland or Ireland during the eighteenth century, and settled in the eastern part of New York State or in New Jersey. One Irish forefather is known to have been descended from Englishmen who had crossed the Irish Channel in the time of William of Orange, or thereabouts; but whether the others who came from Ireland were more English or Celtic is not clear. In America all his ancestors were Protestant, and they appear, without exception, to have been people of education and character. In the several communities in which they settled they prospered above the average. They became farmers, traders, and merchants, and, so far as has yet been discovered, there were only two lawyers, and no doctors or ministers, among them. They seem to have been reckoned as pious people, and several of their number are known to have been generous supporters of the churches in which they worshiped; but, if one may judge by the scanty records which remain, there is no one among them to whom one can point as foreshadowing the inclination to letters and religious speculation that manifested itself strongly in William James and his father. They were mainly concerned to establish themselves in a new country. Inasmuch as they succeeded, lived well, and were respected, it is likely that they possessed a fair endowment of both the imagination and the solid qualities that one thinks of as appropriately combined in the colonists who crossed the ocean in the eighteenth century and did well in the new country. But, as to many of them, it is impossible to do more than presume this, and impossible to carry presumption any farther. The last ancestor to arrive in America was William James's paternal grandfather. This grandfather, whose name was also William James, came from Bally-James-Duff, County Cavan, in the year 1789. He was then eighteen years old. He may have left home because his family tried to force him into the ministry,--for there is a story to that effect,--or he may have had more adventurous reasons. But in any case he arrived in a manner which tradition has cherished as wholly becoming to a first American ancestor--with a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit the field of one of the revolutionary battles. He promptly disposed of his money in making this visit. Then, finding himself penniless in Albany, he took employment as clerk in a store. He worked his way up rapidly; traded on his own account, kept a store, traveled and bought land to the westward, engaged as time went on in many enterprises, among them being the salt industry of Syracuse (where the principal residential street bears his name), prospered exceedingly, and amassed a fortune so large, that after his death it provided a liberal independence for his widow and each of his eleven children. The imagination and sagacity which enabled him to do this inevitably involved him in the public affairs of the community in which he lived, although he seems never to have held political office. Thus his name appears early in the history of the Erie Canal project; and, when that great undertaking was completed and the opening of the waterway was celebrated in 1823, he delivered the "oration" of the day at Albany. It may be found in Munsell's Albany Collections, and considering what were the fashions of the time in such matters, ought to be esteemed by a modern reader for containing more sense and information than "oratory." He was one of the organizers and the first Vice-President of the Albany Savings Bank, founded in 1820, and of the Albany Chamber of Commerce,--the President, in both instances, being Stephen Van Rensselaer. When he died, in 1832, the New York "Evening Post" said of him: "He has done more to build up the city [of Albany] than any other individual." Two portraits of the first William James have survived, and present him as a man of medium height, rather portly, clean-shaven, hearty, friendly, confident, and distinctly Irish. Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken literally, but may be presumed to be indicative. It is told of him, for instance, that one afternoon shortly after he had married for the third time, he saw a lady coming up the steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry Mrs. James was not in." But the poor lady was herself his newly married wife, and cried out to him not to be "so absent-minded." He discovered one day that a man with whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and immediately seized him by the collar and marched him through the streets to a justice. "When old Billy James came to Syracuse," said a citizen who could remember his visits, "things went as _he_ wished." In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street he kept open house and gave a special welcome to members of the Presbyterian ministry. One of his sons said of him: "He was certainly a very easy parent--weakly, nay painfully sensitive to his children's claims upon his sympathy." "The law of the house, within the limits of religious decency, was freedom itself."[1] Indeed, there appears to have been only one matter in which he was rigorous with his family: his Presbyterianism was of the stiffest kind, and in his old age he sacrificed even his affections for what he considered the true faith. Theological differences estranged him from two of his sons,--William and Henry,--and though the old man became reconciled to one of them a few days before his death, he left a will which would have cut them both off with small annuities if its elaborate provisions had been sustained by the Court. In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine Barber,[2] a daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange County, New York. The Barbers had been active people in the affairs of their day. Catherine's grandfather had been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her father and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary Army. One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously graduated from Princeton and had conducted a boarding-school for boys at "Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which Alexander Hamilton prepared for college. During the war he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was detailed by Washington to be one of Steuben's four aides, and performed other staff-duties. John, Catherine's father, returned to Montgomery after the Revolution, was one of the founders of Montgomery Academy, an associate judge of the County Court, a member of the state legislature, and a church elder for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior's, reminiscences there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much addicted to the reading of military history, and which contrasts his stoicism with his wife's warm and spontaneous temperament and her exceptional gift of interesting her grandchildren in conversation.[3] In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is described as having been "a good wife and mother, nothing else--save, to be sure, a kindly friend and neighbor" and "the most democratic person by temperament I ever knew."[4] She adopted the three children of her husband's prior marriages and, by their own account, treated them no differently from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself bore and brought up. She managed her husband's large house during his lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after his death kept it open as a home for children, and grandchildren, and cousins as well. This "dear gentle lady of many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment in addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generosity in all things; for admiration as well as affection and gratitude still attend her memory after the lapse of sixty years. The next generation, eleven in number as has already been said,[5] may well have given their widowed mother "many cares." It had been the purpose of the first William James to provide that his children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid; and his children became financially independent as fast as they came of age. Most of them were blessed with a liberal allowance of that combination of gayety, volubility, and waywardness which is popularly conceded to the Irish; but these qualities, which made them "charming" and "interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them from dissipating both respectable talents and unusual opportunities. Two of the men--William, namely, who became an eccentric but highly respected figure in the Presbyterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be said shortly--possessed an ardor of intellect that neither disaster nor good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole the personalities and histories of that generation were such as to have impressed the boyish mind of the writer of the following letters and of his younger brother like a richly colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns changed and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occasional dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead and gone, the memory of them certainly prompted the author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he described Minny Theale's New York forebears as "an extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls," to have known whom and to have belonged to whom "was to have had one's small world-space both crowded and enlarged." It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one member of that generation. * * * * * Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine, was born in 1811. He was apparently a boy of unusual activity and animal spirits, but at the age of thirteen he met with an accident which maimed him for life. He was, at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one of his fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote the following account of what happened. (The Professor Henry referred to was Joseph Henry, later the head of the Smithsonian Institute.) "On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet Professor Henry in the Park, in front of the Academy, where amusements and instruction would be given in balloon-flying, the motive power being heated air supplied from a tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the boys, when it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One day when] young James had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of these balls was sent into the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist's stable. [James], thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out the flame, but burned his leg." The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years, and one leg was twice amputated above the knee. He was robust enough to survive this long and dire experience of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to establish right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and ample facilities for transportation were to be had. In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady, and in 1835 entered the Princeton Theological Seminary with the class of '39. By the time he had completed two years of his Seminary course, his discontent with the orthodox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already conceived some measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years. [Illustration: Henry James, Sr., and his Wife.] In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came from Killingsley,[6] County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear Boy--that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked her two elder sons. During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James, Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.[7] Shortly afterwards the family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April 15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the correspondence that follows. William James derived so much from his father and resembled him so strikingly in many ways that it is worth while to dwell a little longer on the character, manners, and beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was not only an impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of his children, but always continued to be for them the most vivid and interesting personality who had crossed the horizon of their experience. He was their constant companion, and entered into their interests and poured out his own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and affectionate. His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters rather than that of an American of today,"[8] reveal him richly to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in "A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons. The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843. "Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my _living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life only; a word perhaps of that communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner method--learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with earthliness--to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the _laws_ of these appearances that swim round us in God's great museum--to get hold of some central _facts_ which may make all other facts properly circumferential, and _orderly_ so--and you continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law and central facts, by the dishonor you seem to cast on our intelligence, as if it stood much in our way. Now my conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive apparatus for my life; that there is _nihil in vita_--worth anything, that is--_quod non prius in intellectu_.... Oh, you man without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful tippings-up?"[9] To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic--too early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children. The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust."[10] While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the intensity of revelation. "The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So wrote his son after he had died.[11] He never achieved a truly philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg" and had _kept it_. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed but one message; and the only business of his later life was the formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's proper relation to him. "The usual problem is--given the creation to find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]--given the Creator to find the creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in the struggles of his time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive, radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our connection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time, than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant pool." The reader will readily infer that there was nothing conventional, prim, or parson-like about this man. The fact is that the devoutly religious mind is often quite anarchic in its disregard of all those worldly institutions and conventions which do not express human dependence on the Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in the most allusive and paradoxical terms. "I would rather," he once ejaculated, "have a son of mine corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than have him perfect!" His prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs; "he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.... The moral of all was that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social enough; a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their association with conscience--the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many pedantries."[12] The erroneous statement that has become current, and that describes Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian minister, is a rich absurdity to anyone who knew him or his writings. Not only had the churches in general sold themselves to the devil, in his view, but the arch-sinners in this respect were the Swedenborgian congregations, for they, if any, might be expected to know better. A letter which he wrote to the editor of the "New Jerusalem Messenger," in 1863, illustrates this and tells more about him than could ten pages of description: DEAR SIR,--You were good enough, when I called on you at Mr. Appleton's request in New York, to say among other friendly things that you would send me your paper; and I have regularly received it ever since. I thank you for your kindness, but my conscience refuses any longer to sanction its taxation in this way, as I have never been able to read the paper with any pleasure, nor therefore of course with any profit. I presume its editorials are by you, and while I willingly seized upon every evidence they display of an enlarged spirit, I yet find the general drift of the paper so very poverty-stricken in a spiritual regard, as to make it absolutely the least nutritive reading I know. The old sects are notoriously bad enough, but your sect compares with these very much as a heap of dried cod on Long Wharf in Boston compares with the same fish while still enjoying the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember well the manly strain of your conversation with me in New York, and I know therefore how you must suffer from the control of persons so unworthy as those who have the property of your paper. Why don't you cut the whole concern at once, as a rank offence to every human hope and aspiration? The intercourse I had some years since with the leaders of the sect, on a visit to Boston, made me fully aware of their deplorable want of manhood; but judging from your paper, the whole sect seems spiritually benumbed. Your mature men have an air of childishness and your young men have the aspect of old women. I find it hard above all to imagine the existence of a living woman in the bounds of your sect, whose breasts flow with milk instead of hardening with pedantry. I know such things are of course, but I tell you frankly that these are the sort of questions your paper forces on the unsophisticated mind. I really know nothing so sad and spectral in the shape of literature. It seems composed by skeletons and intended for readers who are content to disown their good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly mechanism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you spiritually, to be so nearly connected with all that sadness and silence, where nothing more musical is heard than the occasional jostling of bone by bone. Do come out of it before you wither as an autumn leaf, which no longer rustles in full-veined life on the pliant bough, but rattles instead with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy earth. Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendliness towards me, and speak to you therefore in return with all the frankness of friendship. Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours cordially, H. JAMES.[13] 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."[14] 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."[15] 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.[16] 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. [Illustration: William James at eighteen. 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."[17] 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."[18] 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,[19] 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.[20] 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. II 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.[21] 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. _To his Family._ CAMBRIDGE, _Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 16, 1861_. DEAREST FAMILY,--This morning, as I was busy over the tenth page of a letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my labor of no account. I had intended to go and see him yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had plenty of work to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits by making them frequent when I was not home-sick. Moreover, Emerson and Tom Ward were going on, and I thought he would have too much of a good thing. But he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and took him to dinner and he is now gone to see [Andrew?] Robeson and Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as always. He says it is pretty lonely at Concord and he misses Bob's lively and sportive wiles very much in the long and lone and dreary evenings, tho' he consoles himself by thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last got to feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new parlor whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it is on the old affair, worth double the price, and the little bedroom under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a capital thing in winter. I like Mrs. Upham's very much. Dark, aristocratic dining-room, with royal cheer--"fish, roast-beef, veal-cutlets or pigeons?" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking, white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for dessert, a choice of three, _three_ of the most succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections, always two plates full--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, combination of jam and cake and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of good old 13 Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miserable me. I get up at six, breakfast and study till nine, when I go to school till one, when dinner, a short loaf and work again till five, then gymnasium or walk till tea, and after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc., etc., till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay my weary head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think of dear old home and Father and Mother and brothers and sister and aunt and cousins and all that the good old Newport sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all winter--I hope so. This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely "muddled and beat"[22] and have to employ most all my time reading up. Agassiz gives now a course of lectures in Boston, to which I have been. He is evidently a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself. But he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his accent is most fascinating. I should like to study under him. Prof. Wyman's lectures on [the] Comp[arative] anatomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed full and well arranged (_nourris_). Eliot I have not seen much of; I don't believe he is a _very_ accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg's friend, is a very nice boy. I walked over to Brookline yesterday afternoon with him to see his aunt, who received me very cordially. There is something extremely good about her. The rest of this year's class is nothing wonderful. In last year's there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I suspect to be a very "smart" fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and violent though. [Storrow] Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is always out, so I have not seen him again. We are only about twelve in the laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have a winter of "crowded" life. I can be as independent as I please, and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of everyone. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too that the "native hue of resolution" has never been of very great shade in me hitherto. But I am sure that that feeling is a right one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I shall turn out all right. I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilk the rosy-gilled and Higginson came in. I now resume it after tea by the light of a taper and that of the moon. This room is without gas and I must get some of the jovial Harry's abhorred kerosene tomorrow. Wilk read Harry's letter and amused me "metch" by his naïve interpretation of mother's most rational request "that I should keep a memorandum of all monies I receive from Father." He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums the prodigal philosopher really gave out, and that mistrust of his generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as Harry framed it, I confess.... * * * * * "Kitty" Temple, next addressed, was the eldest of four Temple cousins, who were daughters of Henry James, Senior's, favorite sister. Having lost both their parents the Temple children had come to live in Newport under the care of their paternal aunt, Mrs. Edmund Tweedie. The fast friendship between the elder Jameses and the Tweedies, the relationship between the two groups of children and the parity of their ages resulted in the Jameses, Temples and Tweedies all living almost as one family. "Minny," Kitty's younger sister, was about seventeen years old and was the enchanting and most adored of all the charming and freely circulating young relatives with whom William had more or less grown up. Henry James drew two of his most appealing heroines from her image,--Minny Theale in the "Wings of the Dove" and Isabel Archer in "The Portrait of a Lady,"--and she is still more authentically revealed by references that recur in "Notes of a Son and Brother" and in the bundle of her own letters with which that volume beautifully closes. In a long-after year William, who was fondly devoted to her, received an early letter of hers containing an affectionate reference to himself and wrote to the friend who had sent it: "I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. As for knowing her as _she_ is now??!! I find that she means as much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience of people. Thank you once more for what you have done." At the time of the next letter, "Minny" had just cut her hair short, and a photograph of her new aspect was the occasion of the badinage about her madness. "Dr. Prince" was an alienist to whom another James cousin had lately been married. _To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet)._ CAMBRIDGE, [_Sept. 1861_]. MY DEAR KITTY,--Imagine if you can with what palpitations I tore open the rude outer envelope of your precious, long-looked-for missive. I read it by the glimmer of the solitary lamp which at eventide lights up the gloom of the dark and humid den called Post Office. And as I read on unconscious of the emotion I was betraying, a vast crowd collected. Profs. Agassiz and Wyman ran with their note-books and proceeded to take observations of the greatest scientific import. I with difficulty reached my lodgings. When thereout fell the Photograph. Wheeeew! oohoo! aha! la-la! [_Marks representing musical flourish_] boisteroso triumphissimmo, chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe and turn summerset! Up came the fire engines; but I proudly waved them aside and plunged bareheaded into the chill and gloomy bowels of the night, to recover by violent exercise the use of my reasoning faculties, which had almost been annihilated by the shock of happiness. As I stalked along, an understanding of the words in your letter grew upon me, and then I felt, my sober senses returning, that I ought not to be so elate. For you certainly bring me bad news enough. Elly's arm broken and Minny gone mad should make me rather drop a tear than laugh. But leaving poor Elly's case for the present, let's speak of Minny and her fearful catastrophe. Do you know, Kitty,--now that it 's all over, I don't see why I should not tell you,--I have often had flashes of horrid doubts about that girl. Occasionally I have caught a glance from her furtive eye, a glance so wild, so weird, so strange, that it has frozen the innermost marrow in my bones; and again the most sickening feeling has come over me as I have noticed fleeting shades of expression on her face, so short, but ah! so piercingly pregnant of the mysteries of mania--_unhuman_, ghoul-like, fiendish-cunning! Ah me! ah me! Now that my worst suspicions have proved true, I feel sad indeed. The well-known, how-often fondly-contemplated features tell the whole story in the photograph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Madness is plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly the arch of the nostril and the curve of the lip, and in ambush along the soft curve of the cheek it lies ready to burst forth in consuming fire. But oh! still is it not pity to think that that fair frame, whilom the chosen fane of intellect and heart, clear and white as noonday's beams, should now be a vast desert through whose lurid and murky glooms glare but the fitful forked lightnings of fuliginous insanity!--Well, Kitty, after all, it is but an organic lesion of the gray cortical substance which forms the _pia mater_ of the brain, which is very consoling to us all. Was she all alone when she did it? Could no one wrest the shears from her vandal hand? I declare I fear to return home,--but of course Dr. Prince has her by this time. I shall weep as soon as I have finished this letter. But now, to speak seriously, I am really shocked and grieved at hearing of poor little Elly's accident and of her suffering. I suppose she bears it though like one of the Amazons of old. I suppose the proper thing for me to do would be to tell her how naughty and careless she was to go and risk her bones in that unprincipled way, and how it will be a good lesson to her for the future about climbing into swings, etc., etc., _ad libitum_; but I will leave that to you, as her elder sister (I have no doubt you've dosed her already), and convey to her only the expression of my warmest condolence and sympathy. I hope to see her getting on finely when I come home, which will be shortly. After all it will soon be over, and then her arm will be better than ever, twice as strong, and who of us are exempt from pain? Take me, for example: you might weep tears of blood to see me day after day forced to hold ignited crucibles in my naked hands till the eyes of my neighbors water and their throats choke with the dense fumes of the burning leather. Yet I ask for no commiseration. Nevertheless I bestow it upon poor Elly, to whom give my best love and say I look forward to seeing her soon. And Henrietta the ablebodied and strongminded--your report of her constancy touched me more than anything has for a long while. Tell her to stick it out for a few days longer and she will be richly rewarded by an apple and a chestnut _from Massachusetts_. As for yourself and sister in the affair of the wings, 'tis but what I expected,--I am too old now to expect much from human nature,--yet after such length of striving to please, so many months of incessant devotion, one _must_ feel a slight twinge. If your sister can still understand, let her know that I thank her for her photograph. Too bad, too bad! With her long locks she would still be winning, outwardly, spite of the howling fiends within; but they gone, like Samson, she has nothing left.--But now, my dear Kitty, I must put an end to my scribbling. This writing in the middle of the week is an unheard-of license, for I must work, work, work. Relentless Chemistry claims its hapless victim. Excuse all faults of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sense on the score of telegraphic haste. Love to all and to yourself. Please "remember me" to your aunt Charlotte, and believe [me] yours affectionately, W. J. _To his Family._ CAMBRIDGE, Sunday afternoon [_Early Nov., 1861_]. DEARLY BELOVED FAMILY,--Wilky and I have just returned from dinner, and having completed a concert for the benefit of the inmates of Pasco Hall and the Hall next door, turn ourselves, I to writing a word home, he to digesting in a "lobbing" position on the sofa. Wilky wrote you a complete account of our transactions in Boston yesterday much better than I could have done. I suppose you will ratify our action as it seemed the only one possible to us. The radiance of Harry's visit[23] has not faded yet, and I come upon gleams of it three or four times a day in my farings to and fro; but it has never a bit diminished the lustre of far-off shining Newport all silver and blue and this heavenly group below[24] (all being more or less failures, especially the two outside ones),--the more so as the above-mentioned Harry could in no wise satisfy my cravings to know of the family and friends, as he did not seem to have been on speaking terms with any of them for some time past and could tell me nothing of what they did, said, or thought about any given subject. Never did I see a so much uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him. He is a good soul though in his way, too--much more so than the light fantastic Wilky, who has been doing nothing but disaster since he has been here, breaking down my good resolutions about eating, keeping me from any intellectual exercise, ruining my best hat wearing it while dressing, while in his night-gown, wishing to wash his face with it on, insisting on sleeping in my bed, inflicting on me thereby the pains of crucifixion, and hardly to be prevented from taking the said hat to bed with him. The odious creature occupied my comfortable armchair all the morning in the position represented in the fine plate which accompanies this letter. But one more night though and he shall be gone and no thorn shall be in the side of the serene and hallowed felicity of expectation in which I shall revel until the time comes for going home, home, home to the hearts of my infancy and budding youth. It is not homesickness I have, if by that term be meant a sickness of heart and loathing of my present surroundings, but a sentiment far transcending this, that makes my hair curl for joy whenever I think of home, by which home comes to me as hope, not as regret, and which puts roses long faded thence in my old mother's cheeks, mildness in my father's voice, flowing graces into my Aunt Kate's movements, babbling confidingness into Harry's talk, a straight parting into Robby's hair and a heavenly tone into the lovely babe's temper, the elastic graces of a kitten into Moses's[25] rusty and rheumatic joints. Aha! Aha! The time will come--Thanksgiving in less than two weeks and then, oh, then!--probably a cold reception, half repellent, no fatted calf, no fresh-baked loaf of spicy bread,--but I dare not think of that side of the picture. I will ever hope and trust and my faith shall be justified. As Wilky has submitted to you a résumé of his future history for the next few years, so will I, hoping it will meet your approval. Thus: one year study chemistry, then spend one term at home, then one year with Wyman, then a medical education, then five or six years with Agassiz, then probably death, death, death with inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously consider. This is a glorious day and I think I must close and take a walk. So farewell, farewell until a quarter to nine Sunday evening soon! Your bold, your beautiful, Your Blossom!! * * * * * _Dedicated to Miss Kitty, oh! I beg pardon, to Miss Temple._ The following curious facts were discovered by the Chemist James in some of his recent investigations: At Pensacola, Fla., there is a navy yard, and consequently many officers of the U.S.A. In Pensacola there is a larger proportional number of old maids than in any city of the Union. The ladies of Pensacola, instead of seeking an eligible partner in the middle ranks of society, spend their lives in a vain attempt to entrap the officers who flirt with them and then leave Pensacola. The moral lesson is evident. * * * * * The "Kitty" to whom James addressed the next letter was another cousin, the daughter of one of his father's elder brothers. Her husband was the alienist to whom the reader will remember that the mad Minny was consigned in a previous letter. It should also be explained that James's two youngest brothers had now entered the Union army, and that one of them, Wilky, adjutant of the first colored regiment, had been wounded in the charge on Fort Wagner in which Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed. _To Mrs. Katharine James (Mrs. William H.) Prince._ CAMBRIDGE, _Sept. 12, 1863_. MY DEAR COUSIN KITTY,--I was very agreeably surprised at getting your letter a few days after arriving here, and am heartily glad to find that you still remember me and think sometimes of the visit you paid us that happy summer. I often think of you, and at such times feel very much like renewing our delightful converse. Several times I have been on the uttermost _brink_ of writing to you, but somehow or other I have always quailed at plunging over. Nature makes us so awkward. I again felt several times like going to pay you a short visit,--last winter and this spring, I remember,--but hesitated, never having been invited, and being entirely ignorant how you would receive me, whether you would chain me up in your asylum and scourge me, or what--tho' I believe those good old days are over. When you were at our house, I recollect I was in the first flush of my chemical enthusiasm. A year and a half of hard work at it here has somewhat dulled my ardor; and after half a year's vegetation at home, I am back here again, studying this time Comparative Anatomy. I am obliged before the 15th of January to make finally and irrevocably "the choice of a profession." I suppose your sex, which has, or should have, its bread brought to it, instead of having to go in search of it, has no idea of the awful responsibility of such a choice. I have four alternatives: Natural History, Medicine, Printing, Beggary. Much may be said in favor of each. I have named them in the ascending order of their pecuniary invitingness. After all, the great problem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together, and I _have_ to consider lucre. To study natural science, I know I should like, but the prospect of supporting a family on $600 a year is not one of those rosy dreams of the future with which the young are said to be haunted. Medicine would pay, and I should still be dealing with subjects which interest me--but how much drudgery and of what an unpleasant kind is there! Of all departments of Medicine, that to which Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I should think, the most interesting. And I should like to see him and his patients at Northampton very much before coming to a decision. The worst of this matter is that everyone must more or less act with insufficient knowledge--"go it blind," as they say. Few can afford the time to try what suits them. However, a few months will show. I shall be most happy some day to avail myself of your very cordial invitation. I have heard so much of the beauty of Northampton that I want very much to see the place too. I heard from home day before yesterday that "Wilky was improving daily." I hope he is, poor fellow. His wound is a very large and bad one and he will be confined to his bed a long while. He bears it like a man. He is the best abolitionist you ever saw, and makes a common one, as we are, feel very small and shabby. Poor little Bob is before Charleston, too. We have not heard from him in a very long while. He made an excellent officer in camp here, every one said, and was promoted. But I must stop. I hope, now that the ice is broken, you will soon feel like writing again. And, if you please, eschew all formality in addressing me by dropping the title of our relationship before my name. As for you, the case is different. My senior, a grave matron, quasi-mother of I know not how many scores, not of children, but of live lunatics, which is far more exceptional and awe-inspiring, I tremble to think I have shown too much levity and familiarity already. Are you very different from what you were two years ago? As no word has passed between us since then, I suppose I should have begun by congratulating you first on your engagement, which is I believe the fashionable thing, then on your marriage, tho' I don't rightly know whether that is fashionable or not. At any rate I now end. Yours most sincerely, WM. JAMES. _To his Mother._ CAMBRIDGE, [_circa Sept., 1863_]. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--...To answer the weighty questions which you propound: I am glad to leave Newport because I am tired of the place itself, and because of the reason which you have very well expressed in your letter, the necessity of the whole family being near the arena of the future activity of us young men. I recommend Cambridge on account of its own pleasantness (though I don't wish to be invidious towards Brookline, Longwood, and other places) and because of its economy if I or Harry continue to study here much longer.... I feel very much the importance of making soon a final choice of my business in life. I stand now at the place where the road forks. One branch leads to material comfort, the flesh-pots; but it seems a kind of selling of one's soul. The other to mental dignity and independence; combined, however, with physical penury. If I myself were the only one concerned I should not hesitate an instant in my choice. But it seems hard on Mrs. W. J., "that not impossible she," to ask her to share an empty purse and a cold hearth. On one side is _science_, upon the other _business_ (the honorable, honored and productive business of printing seems most attractive), with _medicine_, which partakes of [the] advantages of both, between them, but which has drawbacks of its own. I confess I hesitate. I fancy there is a fond maternal cowardice which would make you and every other mother contemplate with complacency the worldly fatness of a son, even if obtained by some sacrifice of his "higher nature." But I fear there might be some anguish in looking back from the pinnacle of prosperity (_necessarily_ reached, if not by eating dirt, at least by renouncing some divine ambrosia) over the life you might have led in the pure pursuit of truth. It seems as if one _could_ not afford to give that up for any bribe, however great. Still, I am undecided. The medical term opens tomorrow and between this and the end of the term here, I shall have an opportunity of seeing a little into medical business. I shall confer with Wyman about the prospects of a naturalist and finally decide. I want you to become familiar with the notion that I _may_ stick to science, however, and drain away at your property for a few years more. If I can get into Agassiz's museum I think it not improbable I may receive a salary of $400 to $500 in a couple of years. I know some stupider than I who have done so. You see in that case how desirable it would be to have a home in Cambridge. Anyhow, I am convinced that somewhere in this neighborhood is the place for us to rest. These matters have been a good deal on my mind lately, and I am very glad to get this chance of pouring them into yours. As for the other boys, I don't know. And that idle and useless young female, Alice, too, whom we shall have to feed and clothe!... Cambridge is all right for business in Boston. Living in Boston or Brookline, etc., would be as expensive as Newport if Harry or I stayed here, for we could not easily go home every day. Give my warmest love to Aunt Kate, Father, who I hope will not tumble again, and all of them over the way. Recess in three weeks; till then, my dearest and best of old mothers, good-bye! Your loving son, W. J. [P.S.] Give my best love to Kitty and give _cette petite_ humbug of a Minny a hint about writing to me. I hope you liked your shawl. * * * * * The physical and nervous frailty, which President Eliot had noticed in James during the first winter at the Scientific School, and which later manifested itself so seriously as to interfere with his studies, kept him from enlisting in the Federal armies during the Civil War. The case was too clear to occasion discussion in his letters. He continued as a student at the School and, at about the time the foregoing letter was written, transferred himself from the Chemical Department to the Department of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, in which Professor Jeffries Wyman was teaching. It was in these two subjects that he himself was to begin teaching ten years later. The next year (1864-65), when he entered the Medical School, Professor Wyman was again his instructor. Jeffries Wyman (1814-1874) was a less widely effective man than Agassiz, but his influence counted more in James's student years than did that of any other teacher. "All the young men who worked under him," says President Eliot, "took him as the type of scientific zeal, disinterestedness and candor." N. S. Shaler, an admirable judge of men, has recorded his opinion of Wyman in his autobiography, saying: "In some ways he was the most perfect naturalist I have ever known ... within the limits of his powers he had the best-balanced mind it has been my good fortune to come into contact with.... Though he published but little, his store of knowledge of the whole field of natural history was surprisingly great, and, as I came to find, it greatly exceeded that of my master Agassiz in its range and accuracy."[26] James, who was Wyman's pupil during two critical years, held him in particular reverence and affection, and said of him: "Those who year by year received part or all of their first year's course of medical instruction from him always speak with a sort of worship of their preceptor. His extraordinary effect on all who knew him is to be accounted for by the one word, character. Never was a man so absolutely without detractors. The quality which every one first thinks of in him is his extraordinary modesty, of which his unfailing geniality and serviceableness, his readiness to confer with and listen to younger men--how often did his unmagisterial manner lead them unawares into taking dogmatic liberties, which soon resulted in ignominious collapse before his quiet wisdom!--were kindred manifestations. Next were his integrity, and his complete and simple devotion to objective truth. These qualities were what gave him such incomparable fairness of judgment in both scientific and worldly matters, and made his opinions so weighty even when they were unaccompanied by reasons.... An accomplished draughtsman, his love and understanding of art were great.... He had if anything too little of the _ego_ in his composition, and all his faults were excesses of virtue. A little more restlessness of ambition, and a little more willingness to use other people for his purposes, would easily have made him more abundantly productive, and would have greatly increased the sphere of his effectiveness and fame. But his example on us younger men, who had the never-to-be-forgotten advantage of working by his side, would then have been, if not less potent, at least different from what we now remember it; and we prefer to think of him forever as the paragon that he was of goodness, disinterestedness, and single-minded love of the truth."[27] The stream of James's correspondence still flowed entirely for his family at this time, and his letters were often facetious accounts of his way of life and occupations. _To his Sister_ (age 15). CAMBRIDGE, _Sept. 13, 1863_. CH�RIE CHARMANTE DE BAL,--Notwithstanding the abuse we poured on each other before parting and the (on _my_ part) feigned expressions of joy at not meeting you again for so many months, it was with the liveliest regret that I left Newport before your return. But I was obliged in order to get a room here--drove, literally drove to it. That you should not have written to me for so long grieves me more than words can tell--you who have nothing to do besides. It shows you to have little affection and _that_ of a poor quality. I have, however, heard from _others_ who tell me that Wilky is doing well, "improving daily," which I am very glad indeed to hear. I am glad you had such a pleasant summer. I am nicely established in a cosy little room, with a large recess with a window in it, containing bed and washstand, separated from the main apartment by a rich green silken curtain and a large gilt cornice. This gives the whole establishment a splendid look. I found when I got here that Miss Upham had changed her price to $5.00. Great efforts were made by two of us to raise a club, but little enthusiasm was shown by anyone else and it fell through. I then, with that fine economical instinct which distinguishes me, resolved to take a tea and breakfast of bread and milk in my room and only pay Miss Upham for dinners. Miss U. is at Swampscott. So I asked to see [her sister] Mrs. Wood, to learn the cost of seven dinners. She, with true motherly instinct, said that I should only make a slop in my room, and that she would rather let me keep on for $4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that Miss U. had sworn _she_ would rather pay _me_ a dollar a week than have me go away. Ablaze with economic passion, I cried "Done!" trying to make it appear as if she had made a formal offer to that effect. But she would not admit it, and after much recrimination we were separated, it being agreed that I should come for $4.50, _but tell no-one_. (Mind _you_ don't either.) I now lay my hand on my heart, and confidently look towards my mother for that glance of approbation which she _must_ bestow. Have I not redeemed any weaknesses of the past? Though part of my conception failed, yet it was boldly planned and would have been a noble stroke. I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling towards Wyman already. I work in a vast museum, at a table all alone, surrounded by skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles, and the like, with the walls hung about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the blood. But I have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. Occasionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum, and sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee, beloved, only they are less fashionably dressed) who whisper: "Is folks allowed here?" It pains me to remark, however, that not all the little girls are of this pleasing type, _most_ being boldfaced jigs. How does Wilky get on? Is Mayberry gone? How is he nursed? Who holds his foot for the doctor? Tell me all about him. Everyone here asks about him, and all without exception seem enthusiastic about the darkeys. How has Aunt Kate's knee been since her return? Sorry indeed was I to leave without seeing her. Give her my best love. Is Kitty Temple as angelic as ever? Give my best love to her and Minny and the little ones. (My little friend Elly, how often I think of her!) Have your lessons with Bradford (the brandy-witness) begun? You may well blush. Tell Harry Mr. [Francis J.] Child is here, just as usual; Mrs. C. at Swampscott. [C. C.] Salter back, but morose. One or two new students, and Prof. [W. W.] Goodwin, who is a very agreeable man. Among other students, a son of Ed. Everett [William Everett], very intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. He took honors at Cambridge, England. Tucks, _mère & fille_ away, _fils_ here.... I send a photograph of Gen. Sickles for yours and Wilky's amusement. It is a part of a great anthropomorphological collection[28] which I am going to make. So take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you will find in the table drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy? Harry's handwriting much better. Desecrate my room as little as possible. Good-bye, much love to Wilky and all. If he wants nursing send for me without hesitation. Love to the Tweedies. Haven't you heard yet from Bobby? Your aff. bro., WM. [Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.] III 1864-1866 _The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz to the Amazon_ IN 1864 the family moved from Newport to Boston, where Henry James, Senior, took a house on Ashburton Place (No. 13) for two years, and there was no more occasion for family letters. Although James began the regular course at the Medical School, he had arrived at no clear professional purpose and no selection of any particular field of study. The School afforded him some measure of preparation for natural science as well as for practice. Philosophy had undoubtedly begun to beckon him, although its appealing gesture lacked authority and did not enlist him in any regular course of philosophic studies. In sixty-five he wrote to his brother Henry from Brazil saying, "When I get home, I'm going to study philosophy all my days." But in many respects his character and tastes matured slowly. The instruction offered by Professor Francis Bowen in Harvard College does not appear to have excited his interest at all. It cannot have failed to excite the irony of his father,--as did everything of the sort that was academic and orthodox,--and James would have been aware of this and might have been influenced. On the other hand, it was obvious that, in the case of his father, who had no connection with church, college or school, the consideration and expression of theories and beliefs had always been a totally unremunerative occupation; and James had to consider how to earn a living. His prospective share of the property that had sufficed for his parents was clearly not going to be enough to support him in independent leisure. In the way of bread and butter, biology and medicine offered more than metaphysical speculation. Last and most important, the tide of contemporary inquiry, driven forward by the storm of the Darwinian controversy, was setting strongly toward a fresh examination of nature. Philosophy must embrace the new reality. Everything that was stimulating in contemporary thought urged men to the scrutiny of the phenomenal world. "Natural History," which has since diversified and amplified itself beyond the use of that appellation, was almost romantically "having its day." Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldener Baum.[29] Thus Goethe, and Louis Agassiz, whose lectures James had already followed, and with the abundance of whose inspiring activity no other scientific energizing could then compare, was fond of quoting the lines. Under such circumstances it was not strange that James should interrupt his medical studies in order to join the expedition which Agassiz was preparing to lead to the Amazon. No richer or more instructive experience could well have offered itself to him at twenty-three than this journey to Brazil seemed to promise. He was no sooner on the Amazon, however, than it became clear to him that he was not intended to be a field-naturalist; and he pictured the stages of this self-discovery in long, diary-like letters which he sent home to his family. On arriving at Rio he was forced to consider the question of his going on or coming home, by an illness that kept him quarantined for several uncomfortable weeks, and left him depressed and unable to use his eyes during several weeks more. Although he decided in favor of continuing with Agassiz, he revealed more and more clearly in his letters that he was seeing Brazil with the eye of an adventurer and lover of landscape rather than of a geologist or collector, and that the months spent in fishing and pickling specimens were to count most for him by teaching him what his vocation was _not_. He found that he was essentially indifferent to the classification of birds, beasts, and fishes, and that he was not made to deal with the riddle of the universe from the only angle of approach that was possible in Agassiz's company. It would be a mistake, however, to let it appear that nine months of collecting with Louis Agassiz were nine months wasted. There are some men whom it is an education to work under, even though the affair in hand be foreign to one's ultimate concern. Agassiz was such an one, "recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense, one of those folio-copies of mankind, like Linnæus and Cuvier." Thirty years after, James could still say of him: "Since Benjamin Franklin we had never had among us a person of more popularly impressive type.... He was so commanding a presence, so curious and enquiring, so responsive and expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and his own, that everyone said immediately, Here is no musty _savant_, but a man, a great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and sin."[30]--"To see facts and not to argue or _raisonniren_ was what life meant for Agassiz," and James, who was already incorrigibly interested in the causes, values and purposes of things, and whose education had been most unsystematic, profited by his corrective influence. "James," said Agassiz at this time, "some people perhaps consider you a bright young man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then, what they will say will be this: That James--oh, yes, I know him; he used to be a very bright young man!" Such "cold-water therapeutics" were gratefully accepted from one who was not only a teacher but a kind friend; and James remembered them, and recorded later that "the hours he spent with Agassiz so taught him the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world's concrete fullness, that he was never able to forget it." Considering with what passionate fidelity his own abstractions always face the concrete, this is perhaps more of an acknowledgment than at first sight appears. * * * * * The Thayer Expedition set sail from New York April 1, 1865. The next letter was written from ship-board, still in New York Harbor. The "Professor" will be recognized as Louis Agassiz. _To his Mother._ [_Mar. 30?_], 1865. ...We have been detained 48 hours on this steamer in port on account of different accidents.... A dense fog is raging which will prevent our going outside as long as it lasts. Sapristi! c'est embêtant.... The Professor has just been expatiating over the map of South America and making projects as if he had Sherman's army at his disposal instead of the ten novices he really has. He may get some students at Rio to accompany the different parties, which will let them be more numerous. I'm sure I hope he will, on account of the language. If each of us has a Portuguese companion, he can do things twice as easily. The Prof. now sits opposite me with his face all aglow, holding forth to the Captain's wife about the imperfect education of the American people. He has talked uninterruptedly for a quarter of an hour at least. I know not how she reacts; I presume she feels somewhat flattered by the attention, however. This morning he made a characteristic speech to Mr. Billings, Mr. Watson's friend. Mr. B. had offered to lend him some books. Agassiz: "May I enter your state-room and take them when I shall want them, sir?" Billings, extending his arm said genially, "Sir, all that I have is yours!" To which, Agassiz, far from being overcome, replied, shaking a monitory finger at the foolishly generous wight, "Look out, sir, dat I take not your skin!" That expresses very well the man. Offering your services to Agassiz is as absurd as it would be for a South Carolinian to invite General Sherman's soldiers to partake of some refreshment when they called at his house.... At this moment Prof. passes behind me and says, "Now today I am going to show you a little what I will have _you_ do." Hurray! I have not been able to get a word out of the old animal yet about my fate. I'm only sorry I can't tell _you_.... _To his Parents._ RIO, BRAZIL, _Apr. 21, 1865_. MY DEAREST PARENTS,--Every one is writing home to catch the steamer which leaves Rio on Monday. I do likewise, although, so far, I have very little to say to you. You cannot conceive how pleasant it is to feel that tomorrow we shall lie in smooth water at Rio and the horrors of this voyage will be over. O the vile Sea! the damned Deep! No one has a right to write about the "nature of Evil," or to have any opinion about evil, who has not been at sea. The awful slough of despond into which you are there plunged furnishes too profound an experience not to be a fruitful one. I cannot yet say what the fruit is in my case, but I am sure some day of an accession of wisdom from it. My sickness did not take an actively nauseous form after the first night and second morning; but for twelve mortal days I was, body and soul, in a more indescribably hopeless, homeless and friendless state than I ever want to be in again. We had a head wind and tolerably rough sea all that time. The trade winds, which I thought were gentle zephyrs, are hideous moist gales that whiten all the waves with foam.... _Sunday Evening._ Yesterday morning at ten o'clock we came to anchor in this harbor, sailing right up without a pilot. No words of mine, or of any man short of William the divine, can give any idea of the magnificence of this harbor and its approaches. The boldest, grandest mountains, far and near. The palms and other trees of such vivid green as I never saw anywhere else. The town "realizes" my idea of an African town in its architecture and effect. Almost everyone is a negro or a negress, which words I perceive we don't know the meaning of with us; a great many of them are native Africans and tattooed. The men have white linen drawers and short shirts of the same kind over them; the women wear huge turbans, and have a peculiar rolling gait that I have never seen any approach to elsewhere. Their attitudes as they sleep and lie about the streets are picturesque to the last degree. Yesterday was, I think, the day of my life on which I had the most outward enjoyment. Nine of us took a boat at about noon and went on shore. The strange sights, the pleasure of walking on terra firma, the delicious smell of land, compared with the hell of the last three weeks, were perfectly intoxicating. Our Portuguese went beautifully,--every visage relaxed at the sight of us and grinned from ear to ear. The amount of fraternal love that was expressed by bowing and gesture was tremendous. We had the best dinner I ever eat. Guess how much it cost. 140,000 reis--literal fact. Paid for by the rich man of the party. The Brazilians are of a pale Indian color, without a particle of red and with a very aged expression. They are very polite and obliging. _All_ wear black beaver hats and glossy black frock coats, which makes them look like _des épiciers endimanchés_. We all returned in good order to the ship at 11 P.M., and I lay awake most of the night on deck listening to the soft notes of the vampire outside of the awning. (Not knowing what it was, we'll call it the vampire.) This morning Tom Ward and I took another cruise on shore, which was equally new and strange. The weather is like Newport. I have not seen the thermometer.... Agassiz just in, delighted with the Emperor's simplicity and the precision of his information; but apparently they did not touch upon our material prospects. He goes to see the Emperor again tomorrow. Agassiz is one of the most fascinating men personally that I ever saw. I could listen to him talk by the hour. He is so childlike. Bishop Potter, who is sitting opposite me writing, asks me to give his best regards to father. I am in such a state of abdominal tumefaction from having eaten bananas all day that I can hardly sit down to write. The bananas here are no whit better than at home, but _so_ cheap and _so_ filling at the price. My fellow "savans" are a very uninteresting crew. Except Tom Ward I don't care if I never see one of 'em again. I like Dr. Cotting very much and Mrs. Agassiz too. I could babble on all night, but must stop somewhere. Dear old Father, Mother, Aunt Kate, Harry and Alice! You little know what thoughts I have had of you since I have been gone. And I have felt more sympathy with Bob and Wilk than ever, from the fact of my isolated circumstances being more like theirs than the life I have led hitherto. Please send them this letter. It is written as much for them as for anyone. I hope Harry is rising like a phoenix from his ashes, under the new régime. Bless him. I wish he or some person I could talk to were along. Thank Aunt Kate once more. Kiss Alice to death. I think Father is the _wisest_ of all men whom I know. Give my love to the girls, especially the Hoopers. Tell Harry to remember me to T. S. P[erry] and to Holmes. Adieu. Your loving W. J. Give my love to Washburn. _To his Father._ RIO, _June 3, 1865_. MY DEAREST OLD FATHER AND MY DEAREST OLD EVERYBODY AT HOME,--I've got so much to say that I don't well know where to begin.--I sent a letter home, I think about a fortnight ago, telling you about my small-pox, etc., but as it went by a sailing vessel it is quite likely that this may reach you first. That was written from the _maison de santé_ where I was lying in the embrace of the loathsome goddess, and from whose hard straw bed, eternal chicken and rice, and extortionate prices I was released yesterday. The disease is over, and granting the necessity of having it, I have reason to think myself most lucky. My face will not be marked at all, although at present it presents the appearance of an immense ripe raspberry.... My sickness began four weeks ago today. You have no idea of the state of bliss into which I have been plunged in the last twenty-four hours by the first draughts of my newly gained freedom. To be dressed, to walk about, to see my friends and the public, to go into the dining-room and order my own dinner, to feel myself growing strong and smooth-skinned again, make a very considerable reaction. Now that I know I am no longer an object of infection, I am perfectly cynical as to my appearance and go into the dining-room here when it is at its fullest, having been invited and authorized thereto by the good people of the hotel. I shall stay here for a week before returning to my quarters, although it is very expensive. But I need a soft bed instead of a hammock, and an arm-chair instead of a trunk to sit upon for some days yet.... In my last letter, I said something about coming home sooner than I expected. Since then, I have thought the matter over seriously and conscientiously every day, and it has resulted in my determining so to do. My coming was a mistake, a mistake as regards what I anticipated, and a pretty expensive one both for you, dear old Father, and for the dear generous old Aunt Kate. I find that by staying I shall learn next to nothing of natural history as I care about learning it. My whole work will be mechanical, finding objects and packing them, and working so hard at that and in traveling that no time at all will be found for studying their structure. The affair reduces itself thus to so many months spent in physical exercise. Can I afford this? _First_, pecuniarily? No! Instead of costing the $600 or $700 Agassiz told me twelve months of it would cost, the expense will be nearer to triple that amount.... _Secondly_, I can't afford the excursion mentally (though that is not exactly the adjective to use). I said to myself before I came away: "W. J., in this excursion you will learn to know yourself and your resources somewhat more intimately than you do now, and will come back with your character considerably evolved and established." This has come true sooner, and in a somewhat different way, than I expected. I am now certain that my forte is not to go on exploring expeditions. I have no inward spur goading me forwards on that line, as I have on several speculative lines. I am convinced now, for good, that I am cut out for a speculative rather than an active life,--I speak now only of my _quality_; as for my _quantity_, I became convinced some time ago and reconciled to the notion, that I was one of the very lightest of featherweights. Now why not be reconciled with my deficiencies? By accepting them your actions cease to be at cross-purposes with your faculties, and you are so much nearer to peace of mind. On the steamer I began to read Humboldt's Travels. Hardly had I opened the book when I seemed to become illuminated. "Good Heavens, when such men are provided to do the work of traveling, exploring, and observing for humanity, men who gravitate into their work as the air does into our lungs, what need, what _business_ have we outsiders to pant after them and toilsomely try to serve as their substitutes? There are men to do all the work which the world requires without the talent of any one being strained." Men's activities are occupied in two ways: in grappling with external circumstances, and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind. You must know, dear Father, what I mean, tho' I can't must[er] strength of brain enough now to express myself with precision. The grit and energy of some men are called forth by the resistance of the world. But as for myself, I seem to have no spirit whatever of that kind, no pride which makes me ashamed to say, "I can't do that." But I have a mental pride and shame which, although they seem more egotistical than the other kind, are still the only things that can stir my blood. These lines seem to satisfy me, although to many they would appear the height of indolence and contemptibleness: "Ne forçons point notre talent,--Nous ne ferions rien avec grâce,--Jamais un lourdaud, quoi-qu'il fasse,--Ne deviendra un galant." Now all the time I should be gone on this expedition I should have a pining after books and study as I have had hitherto, and a feeling that this work was not in my path and was so much waste of life. I had misgivings to this effect before starting; but I was so filled with enthusiasm, and the romance of the thing seemed so great, that I stifled them. Here on the ground the romance vanishes and the misgivings float up. I have determined to listen to them this time. I said that my act was an expensive mistake as regards what I anticipated, but I have got this other _edification_ from it. It has to be got some time, and perhaps only through some great mistake; for there are some familiar axioms which the individual only seems able to learn the meaning of through his individual experience. I don't know whether I have expressed myself so as to let you understand exactly how I feel. O my dear, affectionate, wise old Father, how I longed to see you while I lay there with the small-pox,[31] first revolving these things over! and how I longed to confer with you in a more confiding way than I often do at home! When I get there I can explain the gaps. As this letter does not sail till next Saturday (this is Sunday), I will stop for the present, as I feel quite tired out.... * * * * * It was not feasible for James to leave the expedition and return home immediately, and soon after the last letter was written, his returning health and eyesight brought with them a more cheerful mood. He determined to stay in Brazil for a few months longer. _To his Father._ RIVER SOLIMOES (AMAZON), _Sept. 12-15, 1865_. MY DEAREST DADDY,--Great was my joy the other evening, on arriving at Manaos, to get a batch of letters from you.... I could do no more then than merely "accuse" the reception. Now I can manage to sweat out a few lines of reply. It is noon and the heat is frightful. We have all come to the conclusion that, for _us_ at least, there will be no hell hereafter. We have all become regular alembics, and the heat grows upon you, I find. Nevertheless it is not the dead, sickening heat of home. It is more like a lively baking, and the nights remain cool. We are just entering on the mosquito country, and I suspect our suffering will be great from them and the flies. While the steamboat is in motion we don't have them, but when she stops you can hardly open your mouth without getting it full of them. Poor Mr. Bourkhardt is awfully poisoned and swollen up by bites he got ten days ago on a bayou. At the same time with the mosquitoes, the other living things seem to increase; so it has its good side. The river is much narrower--about two miles wide perhaps or three (I'm no judge)--very darkly muddy and swirling rapidly down past the beautiful woods and islands. We are all going up as far as Tabatinga, when the Professor and Madam, with some others, go into Peru to the Mountains, while Bourget and I will get a canoe and some men and spend a month on the river between Tabatinga and Ega. Bourget is a very dog, yapping and yelping at every one, but a very hard-working collector, and I can get along very well with him. We shall have a very gypsy-like, if a very uncomfortable time. The best of this river is that you can't bathe in it on account of the numerous anthropophagous fishes who bite mouthfuls out of you. Tom Ward _may_ possibly be out and at Manaos by the time we get back there at the end of October. Heaven grant he may, poor fellow! I'd rather see him than any one on this continent. Agassiz is perfectly delighted with him, his intelligence and his energy, thinks him in fact much the best man of the expedition. I see no reason to regret my determination to stay. "On contrary," as Agassiz says, as I begin to use my eyes a little every day, I feel like an entirely new being. Everything revives within and without, and I now feel sure that I shall learn. I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is. No one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends, and you have a greater feeling of weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz's mind, owing to the continual presence of this great background of special facts, than about the mind of any other man I know. He has a great personal tact too, and I see that in all his talks with me he is pitching into my loose and superficial way of thinking.... Now that I am become more intimate with him, and can talk more freely to him, I delight to be with him. I only saw his defects at first, but now his wonderful qualities throw them quite in the background. I am convinced that he is the man to do me good. He will certainly have earned a holiday when he gets home. I never saw a man work so hard. Physically, intellectually and socially he has done the work of ten different men since he has been in Brazil; the only danger is of his overdoing it.... I am beginning to get impatient with the Brazilian sleepiness and ignorance. These Indians are particularly exasperating by their laziness and stolidity. It would be amusing if it were not so infuriating to see how impossible it is to make one hurry, no matter how imminent the emergency. How queer and how exhilarating all those home letters were, with their accounts of what every one was doing, doing, doing. To me, just awakening from my life of forced idleness and from an atmosphere of Brazilian inanity, it seemed as if a little window had been opened and a life-giving blast of one of our October nor'westers had blown into my lungs for half an hour. I had no idea before of the real greatness of American energy. They wood up the steamer here for instance at the rate (accurately counted) of eight to twelve logs a minute. It takes them two and one-half hours to put in as much wood as would go in at home in less than fifteen minutes. [Illustration: A Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.] Every note from home makes me proud of our country.... I have not been able to look at the papers, but I have heard a good deal. I do hope our people will not be such fools as to hang Jeff. Davis for treason. Can any one believe in revenge now? And if not for that, for what else should we hang the poor wretch? Lincoln's violent death did more to endear him to those indifferent and unfriendly to him than the whole prosperous remainder of his life could have done; and so will Jeff's if he is hung. Poor old Abe! What is it that moves you so about his simple, unprejudiced, unpretending, honest career? I can't tell why, but albeit unused to the melting mood, I can hardly ever think of Abraham Lincoln without feeling on the point of blubbering. Is it that he seems the representative of pure simple human nature against all conventional additions?... _To his Parents._ TEFF� (AMAZON), _Oct. 21, 1865_. ...I left the party up at Saõ Paulo the 20th of last month and got here the 16th of this, having gone up two rivers, the Içá and Jutay, and made collections of fishes which were very satisfactory to the Prof. as they contained almost one hundred new species. On the whole it was a most original month, and one which from its strangeness I shall remember to my dying day; much discomfort from insects and rain, much ecstasy from the lovely landscape, much hard work and heat, a very disagreeable companion, J---- [added to the party in Brazil], the very best of fare, turtle and fresh fish every day, and running through all a delightful savor of freedom and gypsy-hood which sweetened all that might have been unpleasant. We slept on the beaches every night and fraternized with the Indians, who are socially very agreeable, but mentally a most barren people. I suppose they are the most exclusively practical race in the world. When I get home I shall bore you with all kinds of stories about them. I found the rest of the party at this most beautiful little place in a wonderful picturesque house. It was right pleasant to meet them again. The Prof. has been working himself out and is thin and nervous. That good woman, Mrs. Agassiz, is perfectly well. The boys, poor fellows, have all their legs in an awful condition from a kind of mite called "muguim" which gets under the skin and makes dreadful sores. You can't walk in the woods without getting them on you, and poor Hunney [Hunnewell] is ulcerated very badly. They have no mosquitoes though here. Since last night we have had everything packed--our packing-work, its volume, its dirtyness, and its misery is wonderful. Twenty-nine full barrels of specimens from here, and hardly one tight barrel among them. The burly execrations of the burly Dexter when at the cooper's work would make your hair shiver. But when a good barrel presents itself, then the calm joy almost makes amends for the past. Dexter says he has the same feeling for a decent barrel that he has for a beautiful woman. When the steamer comes we are going down to Manaos, where we expect the gunboat which the government has promised the Prof. Dexter and Tal go up the Rio Negro for a month. The rest of us are going to the Madeira River in the steamer. I don't know what I shall do exactly, but there will probably be some canoeing to be done, in which case I'm ready; tho' the rainy season is beginning, which makes canoe traveling very uncomfortable. We shall be at Parâ by the middle of December certainly. I am very anxious to learn whether the New York and Brazilian steamers are to run. We may learn at Manaos, where there is also a chance for letters for us, and American papers. Why can't you send the "North American," with Father's and Harry's articles? It would be worth any price to me. * * * * * _22nd Oct._ On board the old homestead, viz., Steamer Icamiaba. The only haven of rest we have in this country, and then only when she is in motion; for when we stop at a place, the Prof. is sure to come around and say how very desirable it would be to get a large number of fishes from this place, and willy-nilly you must trudge. I wrote in my last letter something about the possibility of my wishing to go down South again with the Professor. I don't think there is any more probability of it than of my wishing to explore Central Africa. If there is anything I hate, it is collecting. I don't think it is suited to my genius at all; but for that very reason this little exercise in it I am having here is the better for me. I am getting to be very practical, orderly, and businesslike. That fine disorder which used to prevail in my precincts, and which used to make Mother heave a beautiful sigh when she entered my room, is treated by the people with whom I am here as a heinous crime, and I feel very sensitive and ashamed about it. The 22nd of October!--what glorious weather you are having at home now, and how we should all like to be wound up by one day of it! I have often longed for a good, black, sour, sleety, sloshy winter's day in Washington Street. Oh, the bliss of standing on such a day half way between Roxbury and Boston and having all the horse-cars pass you full! It will be splendid to get home in mid-winter and revel in the cold. I am delighted to hear how well Wilky is, and to hear from him. I wish Bob would write me a line--and only one letter from Alice in all this time--shame! Oh, the lovely white child! How the red man of the forest would like to hug her to his bosom once more! I proposed, beloved Alice, to write thee a long letter by this steamer describing my wonderful adventures with the wild Indians, and the tiger [jaguar?], and various details which interest thy lovely female mind; but I feel so darned heavy and seedy this morning that I cannot pump up the flow of words, and the letter goes on with the steamer from Manaos this evening. This expedition has been far less adventurous and far more picturesque than I expected. I have not yet seen a single snake wild here. The adventure with the tiger consisted in his approaching to within 30 paces of our mosquito net, and roaring so as to wake us, and then keeping us awake most of the rest of the night by roaring far and near. I confess I felt some skeert, on being suddenly awoke by him, tho' when I had laid me down I had mocked the apprehensions of Tal about tigers. The adventure with the wild Indians consisted in our seeing two of them naked at a distance on the edge of the forest. On shouting to them in Lingoa Geral they ran away. It gave me a very peculiar and unexpected thrilling sensation to come thus suddenly upon these children of Nature. But I now tell you in confidence, my beloved white child, what you must not tell any of the rest of the family (for it would spoil the adventure), that we discovered a few hours later that these wild Indians were a couple of mulattoes belonging to another canoe, who had been in bathing. I shall have to stop now. Do you still go to school at Miss Clapp's? For Heaven's sake write to me, Bal! Tell Harry if he sees [John] Bancroft to tell him Bourkhardt is much better, having found an Indian remedy of great efficacy. Please give my best love to the Tweedies, Temples, Washburns, La Farges, Paine, Childs, Elly Van Buren and in fact everybody who is in any way connected with me. Best of love to Aunt Kate, Wilk and Bob, Harry and all the family. I pine for Harry's literary _efforts_ and to see a number or so of the "Nation." You can't send too many magazines or papers--Care of James B. Bond, Parâ. W. J. IV 1866-1867 _Medical Studies at Harvard_ JAMES returned from Brazil in March, 1866, and immediately entered the Massachusetts General Hospital for a summer's service as undergraduate interne. In the autumn he left the Hospital and resumed his studies in the Harvard Medical School. The Faculty of the School then included Dr. O. W. Holmes and Professor Jeffries Wyman. Charles Ed. Brown-Séquard was lecturing on the pathology of the nervous system. During the years of James's interrupted course a number of men attended the school who were to be his friends and colleagues for many years thereafter--among them William G. Farlow, subsequently Professor of Cryptogamic Botany and a Cambridge neighbor for forty years, and Charles P. Putnam and James J. Putnam--two brothers in whose company he was later to spend many Adirondack vacations and to whom he became warmly attached. Henry P. Bowditch, whose instinct for physiological inquiry was already vigorous, and who was destined to become a leader of research in America, and the teacher and inspirer of a generation of younger investigators, was another Medical School contemporary with whom he formed an enduring friendship. The instruction given in the Harvard Medical School in the sixties was as good as any obtainable in America, but it fell short of what is nowadays reckoned as essential for a medical education to an extent that none but a modern student of medicine can understand. The emphasis was still on lectures, demonstrations and reading, and the pupil's rôle was an almost completely passive one. James, according to the testimony of one of his classmates, made a solitary exception to the practice of the class by attempting to keep a graphic record of his microscopic studies in histology and pathology. When questioned about this long after, he admitted that he believed himself to have been the only student of his time in the Medical School who took the trouble to make drawings from the microscopic field with regularity. The teaching of Pasteur and Lister had not then revolutionized medicine. Modern bacteriology and the possibilities of aseptic surgery were yet to be understood. Surgeons who operated in the amphitheatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital could still take pride in appearing in blood-soiled gowns, much as a fisherman scorns a brand-new outfit and sports his weather-rusted old clothes. The demonstrations of even Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, a skillful operator who was then a leader in his profession, filled James with a horror which he never forgot. On the other hand, the discovery of anesthesia, which made possible an enlarged and humane use of animals for experimental inquiry, and such illuminating reports and investigations as those of Claude Bernard, Helmholtz, Virchow and Ludwig were giving a great impetus to the investigation of bodily processes and functions, and a study of these was a possible next step in James's evolution. He had already been unusually well grounded in comparative anatomy by Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman. He was gravitating surely, even if he did not yet realize it clearly, toward philosophy. Whenever he more or less consciously projected himself forward, it must have seemed to him that the examination of processes in the living body, for which he was already prepared, might be related, in an enlightening way, to the philosophic pursuits that were beginning to invite him. Physiology therefore commanded both his respect and his curiosity, and he turned in that direction rather than toward what he then saw surgery and the practice of internal medicine to be. During the winter of 1866-67 he lived with his parents in the house[32] in Quincy Street, Cambridge, in which they had settled themselves, and worked regularly at the Medical School. He had come back from the year of mere animal existence on the Amazon in excellent physical condition. Of the four letters which follow, two were written to Thomas W. Ward, who, it will be remembered, had been a member of the Amazon Expedition, and who, after getting back to New York, had entered the great Baring banking house of which his father, Samuel Ward, was the American partner. O. W. Holmes, Jr., will be recognized as the present Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In no one did James find more sympathetic philosophic companionship at this period. _To Thomas W. Ward._ BOSTON, _Mar. 27, 1866_. MEO CARO COMPADRE,--I have been intending to write you every night for the last month, but the strange epistolary inertia which always weighs down upon me has kept me from it until now. I have had news of you two or three times from my father having met yours, and from Dexter, who said he had met you in New York. I am very curious to know how you find your occupation to suit you, and if you find the dust of daily drudgery to obscure at all the visions of your far-off-future power. From what Dexter said I am afraid they do a little. We had given up Allen[33] as gone to the fishes; but the poor Devil arrived last week after a 98-days' passage!!! I never felt gladder for anything in my life. He had a horrible time at sea, being within 160 miles of New York and then blown back as far as St. Thomas. He says most of his collections arrived at Bahia spoiled by the sun. He was sixteen days crossing a limestone desert on which nothing grew but cacti; so there was no shade at noon, and the thermometer at 98°. His health has been improved by the voyage, however, and he thinks it is better now than when he left for Brazil. Nevertheless he is going to give up natural history for the present and adopt some out-of-door life till he gets decidedly better, which he says he has been slowly but steadily doing for some years past. Poor Allen! None of us have been sold as badly as he. If I had not been to Brazil, I would go again to do what I have done, knowing beforehand what it would be. Allen says _he_ would not, on any account. I have been studying now for about two weeks, and think I shall be much more interested in it than before. It was some time before I could get settled down to reading. But now I do it quite naturally, and even _thinking_ is beginning not to feel like a wholly abnormal process; all which, as you may imagine, is very agreeable--altho' I confess that as yet the philosophical _rouages_ of my mind have not attained even to the degree of lubrication they had before I left. I shan't apologize for the egotistical pronoun, for I suppose, my dear old Thomas, that you will be interested to compare my experience since my return with yours, and learn something from it if possible--even as I would with yours. I spent the first month of my return in nothing but "social intercourse," having the two Temple girls and Elly Van Buren in the house for a fortnight, and being obliged to escort them about to parties, etc., nearly every night. The consequences were a falling in love with every girl I met--succeeded now by a reaction which makes me, and will make me for a long time, decline every invitation. I feel now somehow as if I had settled down upon a steady track that I shall not have much temptation to slip off of, for a good many months at any rate. I am conscious of a desire I never had before so strongly or so permanently, of narrowing and deepening the channel of my intellectual activity, of economizing my feeble energies and consequently treating with more _respect_ the few things I shall devote them to. This temper may be a transient one; mais pour peu qu'il dure un an ou deux, to fix the shorter term! I'm sure it will give a tone to my mind it lacked before. As for the disrespect with which you treat the worthy problems that you turn your back upon, I don't see now exactly how you get over that; but something tells me that, practically, my salvation depends for the present on following some such plan. And, I am sure that, in the majority of men at any rate, the process of growing into a calm mental state is not one of leveling, but of going around, difficulties. The problem they solve is not one of being, but of method. They reach a point from which the view within certain limits is harmonious, and they keep within those limits; they find as it were a centre of oscillation in which they may be at rest. Now whether any other kind of solution is possible, I don't know. Many men will say not; but I feel somehow, now, as if I had no right to an opinion on any subject, no right to open my mouth before others until I know some _one_ thing as thoroughly as it can be known, no matter how insignificant it may be. After that I shall perhaps be able to think on general subjects.--The only fellow here I care anything about is Holmes, who is on the whole a first-rate article, and one which improves by wear. He is perhaps too exclusively intellectual, but sees things so easily and clearly and talks so admirably that it's a treat to be with him. T. S. Perry is also flourishing in health and spirits. Ed[ward] Emerson I have not yet seen. I made the acquaintance the other day of Miss Fanny Dixwell of Cambridge (the eldest), do you know her? She is decidedly AI, and (so far) the best girl I have known. I should like if possible to confine my whole life to her, Ellen Hooper, Sara Sedgwick,[34] Holmes, Harry, and the Medical School, for an indefinite period, letting no breath of extraneous air enter. There, I hope that's a confession of faith. I wish you would write me a similar or even more "developed" one, for I really want to know how the building up into flesh and blood of the wide-sweeping plans that the solitudes of Brazil gave birth to seems to alter them. Write soon, and I'll answer soon; for I think, Chéri de Thomas, que ce doux commerce que nous avons mené tant d'années ought not all of a sudden to die out. I'd give a great deal to see you, but see no prospect of getting to New York for a long time. Our family spends six months at Swampscott from the first of May. I shall have a room in town. What chance is there of your being able to pay us a visit at Swampscott in my vacation (from July 15 to Sept. 15)? Ever your friend WM. JAMES. _To Thomas W. Ward._ BOSTON, _June 8, 1866_. CH�RI DE THOMAS,--I cannot exactly say I _hasten_ to reply to your letter. I have thought of you about every day since I received it, and given you a Brazilian hug therewith, and wanted to write to you; but having been in a pretty unsettled theoretical condition myself, from which I hoped some positive conclusions might emerge worthy to be presented to you as the last word on the Kosmos and the human soul, I deferred writing from day to day, thinking that better than to offer you the crude and premature spawning of my intelligence. In vain! the conclusions never have emerged, and I see that, if I am _ever_ to write you, I must do it on the spur of the moment, with all my dullness thick upon me. I have just read your letter over again, and am grieved afresh at your melancholy tone about yourself. You ask why I am quiet, while you are so restless. Partly from the original constitution of things, I suppose; partly because I am less quiet than you suppose; only I once heard a proverb about a man consuming his own smoke, and I do so particularly in your presence because you, being so much more turbid, produce a reaction in me; partly because I am a few years older than you, and have not solved, but grown callous (I hear your sneer) to, many of the problems that now torture you. The _chief_ reason is the original constitution of things, which generated me with fewer sympathies and wants than you, and also perhaps with a certain tranquil confidence in the right ordering of the Whole, which makes me indifferent in some circumstances where you would fret. Yours the nobler, mine the happier part! I _think_, too, that much of your uneasiness comes from that to which you allude in your letter--your oscillatoriness, and your regarding each oscillation as something final as long as it lasts. There is nothing more certain than that every man's life (except perhaps Harry Quincy's) is a line that continuously oscillates on every side of its direction; and if you would be more confident that any state of tension you may at any time find yourself in will inevitably relieve _itself_, sooner or later, you would spare yourself much anxiety. I myself have felt in the last six months more and more certain that each man's constitution limits him to a certain amount of emotion and action, and that, if he insists on going under a higher pressure than normal for three months, for instance, he will pay for it by passing the next three months below par. So the best way is to keep moving steadily and regularly, as your mind becomes thus deliciously appeased (as you imagine mine to be; ah! Tom, what damned fools we are!). If you feel below par now, don't think your life is deserting you forever. You are just as sure to be up again as you are, when elated, sure to be down again. Six months, or any given cycle of time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount, and your fretful anxiety when in a stagnant mood is frivolous. The good time will come again, as it has come; and go too. I think we ought to be independent of our moods, look on them as external, for they come to us unbidden, and feel if possible neither elated nor depressed, but keep our eyes upon our work and, if we have done the best we could _in that given condition_, be satisfied. I don't know whether all this solemn wisdom of mine seems to you anything better than conceited irrelevance. I began the other day to read the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Long, published by Ticknor, which, if you have not read, I advise you to read, slowly. I only read two or three pages a day, and am only half through the book. He certainly had an invincible soul; and it seems to me that any man who can, like him, grasp the love of a "life according to nature," _i.e._, a life in which your individual will becomes so harmonized to nature's will as cheerfully to acquiesce in whatever she assigns to you, knowing that you serve _some_ purpose in her vast machinery which will never be revealed to you--any man who can do this will, I say, be a pleasing spectacle, no matter what his lot in life. I think old Mark's perpetual yearnings for patience and equanimity and kindliness would do your heart good.--I have come to feel lately, more and more (I can't tell though whether it will be permanent) like paying my footing in the world in a very humble way, (driving my physicking trade like any other tenth-rate man), and then living my free life in my leisure hours entirely within my own breast as a thing the world has nothing to do with; and living it easily and patiently, without feeling responsible for its future. I will now, my dear old Tom, stop my crudities. Although these notions and others have of late led me to a pretty practical contentment, I cannot help feeling as if I were insulting Heaven by offering them about as if they had an absolute worth. Still, as I am willing to take them all back whenever it seems right, you will excuse my apparent conceit. Besides, they may suggest some practical point of view to you. The family is at Swampscott. I have a room in Bowdoin Street for the secular part of the week. We have a very nice house in Swampscott.... I am anxiously waiting your arrival on Class Day. I expect you to spend all your time with me either here or in Swampscott, when we shall, I trust, patch up the Kosmos satisfactorily and rescue it from its present fragmentary condition.... _To his Sister._ CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 14, 1866_. CH�RIE DE JEUNE BALLE,--I am just in from town in the keen, cold and eke beauteous moonlight, which by the above qualities makes me think of thee, to whom, nor to whose aunt, have I (not) yet written. (I don't understand the grammar of the not.) Your first question is, "where have I been?" "To C. S. Peirce's lecture, which I could not understand a word of, but rather enjoyed the sensation of listening to for an hour." I then turned to O. W. Holmes's and wrangled with him for another hour. You may thank your stars that you are not in a place where you have to ride in such full horse-cars as these. I rode half way out with my "form" entirely out of the car overhanging the road, my feet alone being on the same vertical line as any part of the car, there being just room for them on the step. Aunt Kate may, and probably _will_, have shoot through her prolific mind the supposish: "How wrong in him to do sich! for if, while in that posish, he should have a sudden stroke of paralysis, or faint, his nerveless fingers relaxing their grasp of the rail, he would fall prostrate to the ground and bust." To which I reply that, when I go so far as to have a stroke of paralysis, I shall not mind going a step farther and getting bruised. Your next question probably is "_how_ are and _where_ are father and mother?"... I think father seems more lively for a few days past and cracks jokes with Harry, etc. Mother is recovering from one of her indispositions, which she bears like an angel, doing any amount of work at the same time, putting up cornices and raking out the garret-room like a little buffalo. Your next question is "wherever is Harry?" I answer: "He is to Ashburner's, to a tea-squall in favor of Miss Haggerty." I declined. He is well. We have had nothing but invitations (6) in 3 or 4 days. One, a painted one, from "Mrs. L----," whoever she may be. I replied that domestic affliction prevented me from going, but I would take a pecuniary equivalent instead, viz: To 1 oyster stew 30 cts., 1 chicken salad 0.50, 1 roll 0.02, 3 ice creams at 20 cts. 0.60, 6 small cakes at 0.05, 0.30, 1 pear $1.50, 1 lb. confectionery 0.50. 6 glasses hock at 0.50 $3.00 3 glasses sherry at 30 0.90 Salad spilt on floor 5.00 Dish of do., broken 3.00 Damage to carpet & Miss L----'s dress frm. do 75.00 3 glasses broken 1.20 Curtains set fire to in dressing-room 40.00 Other injury frm. fire in room 250.00 Injury to house frm. water pumped upon it by steam fire-engine come to put out fire 5000.00 Miscellaneous 0.35 ------- 5300.00 I expect momentarily her reply with a check, and when it comes will take you and Aunt Kate on a tour in Europe and have you examined by the leading physicians and surgeons of that country. M---- L---- came out here and dined with us yesterday of her own accord. I no longer doubt what I always suspected, her _penchant_ for me, and I don't blame her for it. Elly Temple staid here two days, too. She scratched, smote, beat, and kicked me so that I shall dread to meet her again. What an awful time Bob & Co. must have had at sea! and how anxious you must have been about them. With best love to Aunt Kate and yourself believe me your af. bro. WM. JAMES. _To O. W. Holmes, Jr._ [A pencil memorandum, Winter of 1866-67?] Why I'm blest if I'm a Materialist: The materialist posits an X for his ultimate principle. Were he satisfied to inhabit this vacuous X, I should not at present try to disturb him. But that atmosphere is too rare; so he spends all his time on the road between it and sensible realities, engaged in the laudable pursuit of degrading every (sensibly) higher thing into a (sensibly) lower. He thus accomplishes an immensely great positively conceived and felt result, and it availeth little to naturalize the sensible impression of this that he should at the end put in his little caveat that, after all, the low denomination is as unreal as the unreduced higher ones were. In the confession of ignorance is nothing which the mind can close upon and clutch--it's a vanishing negation; while the pretension of knowledge is full of positive, massively-felt contents. The former kicks the beam. What balm is it, when instead of my High you have given me a Low, to tell me that the Low is good for nothing? If you take my $1000 gold and give me greenbacks, I feel unreconciled still, even when you have assured me that the greenbacks are counterfeit. Or what comfort is it to me now to be told that a billion years hence greenbacks and gold will have the same value? especially when that is explained to be zero? How anyone can say that this pennyworth of negation can so balance these tons of affirmation as to make the naturalist _feel_ like anyone else--I confess it's a mystery to me. But as a man's happiness depends on his feeling, I think materialism inconsistent with a high degree thereof, and in this sense maintained that a materialist should not be an optimist, using the latter word to signify one whose philosophy authenticates, by guaranteeing the objective significance of, his most pleasurable feelings. You have transferred the question of optimism to a wider field, where I can't well follow it now. The term would have to be defined first, and then I think it would take me ten or twelve years of hard study to form any opinion as to the truth of your second premise.--I send the above remarks on "materialism," because they were what I was groping for the other evening, but could not say till you were gone and I in bed. To conclude: _Corruptio optimistorum pessima!_ [Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.] V 1867-1868 _Eighteen Months in Germany_ IN the spring of 1867 James interrupted his course at the Medical School again. He was impelled to do this, partly by the pressure of a conviction that his health required him to stop work or continue elsewhere under different conditions, and partly by a desire to learn German and study physiology in the German laboratories. He knew a little German already, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that if he went abroad immediately he would have time to familiarize himself with the language during a pleasant and restful summer and would be ready to enter one of the universities in the autumn. He sailed in April and spent the summer in Dresden and Bohemia. But his health became worse instead of better. It is unnecessary to detail the record of a long illness by selecting for this book the passages of his correspondence in which James sooner or later revealed what his condition was. It would also be idle to inquire closely about the causes of his illness, considering that, for one reason, James was completely puzzled and baffled himself. Insomnia, digestive disorders, eye-troubles, weakness of the back, and sometimes deep depression of spirits followed each other or afflicted him simultaneously. If his trouble was in part nervous, it was a reality none the less. A photograph that was taken of him at about this period recorded the aspect of a very ill man. If his introspective genius made things worse for him for a while, it probably did more to pull him through in the end than the--to our present-day understanding--harsh and unnecessary treatments, regimens, water-cures, courses of exercise, galvanisms, and blistering to which he subjected himself. On the other hand, the illness which began in 1867, and which limited James's activities and occupations for several years, had another effect. It overtook him when he was only twenty-five years old, and threw him heavily upon his inner moral and intellectual resources. It caught him alone and among strangers, more or less prostrated him, and defeated his plans just at a time of life when he was beginning, with the eagerness of youth and philosophic genius combined, to reckon over each fresh experience into the terms of a possible answer to the riddles of life and death, predestination, freedom, and responsibility. It gave a personal intimacy and intensity to the deepest problems that philosophy and religion can present to man's understanding. This illness may perhaps have prevented James from becoming a physiological investigator. But clearly it developed and deepened the bed in which the stream of his philosophic life was to flow. He sailed for Europe in April, and went almost directly to Dresden, where he found quarters in a _pension_ presided over by an amiable Frau Spannenberg. He spent his mornings, and often his evenings, reading and studying German. He made an excursion to Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, but the "cure" there did not greatly relieve his back, and the baths made him feel "as if his brain had been boiled,"[35] so he returned to Frau Spannenberg's. In the early autumn he moved to Berlin, attended a few lectures at the University there, and read a good deal on the physiology of the nervous system; but he was unable to work in the laboratories, and found it expedient to return to Teplitz at the end of January (1868). What he did thereafter will appear as the letters proceed. _To his Parents._ DRESDEN, _May 27, 1867_. ...Though I have been just a little over two weeks settled in Dresden, I hardly know anything about it or about Germany yet. Nothing but confused, vague and probably erroneous impressions of the people, owing chiefly to my imperfect knowledge of the language. In the first place there is not the slightest touch of the romantic, picturesque, or even _foreign_ about living here. I think there is very little absolutely in the place to give such impressions, and I think I have outgrown my old susceptibility to them. Whereas in old times I used to notice every window, door-handle and smell as having a peculiar and exotic charm, every old street and house as filled with historic life and mystery, they are now to me streets and houses and nothing more. The heyday of youth is o'er! Alack the day! My traveling has been accompanied with hardly more astonishment or excitement than would accompany a journey to Chicago.... [Illustration: William James at twenty-five. From a Photograph] The place which has most invited me to live in it is Strasburg. The people all speak both French and German, each with the other's accent, and the environs are ravishing. The Saxons are a very short and ill-favored race, both sexes, not light-haired as the Rhinelanders, and most eccentrically toothed. Many of the young officers, however, are very good-looking fellows. The poor people wear old greasy caps and black coats, and no collars, but black cravats as in England, and look very ugly. The great number of _old_ men and women here has struck me very much. Can it be that we have so few at home? or do we keep them indoors? Or do the Germans show their age so much sooner? I know not. The Americans I have met have been a poor crowd. The English I have seen have been distinguished by their pure and clean appearance, and by an awkwardness which in a certain way appeals to your sympathies. They have the faculty of _blushing_ which is denied to the French and comparatively to the Germans, and in spite of all my prejudices I feel more akin to them than to the others. I have, since I wrote my last letter, led a perfectly monotonous life. Read all the morning, go out for a walk and a lounge in a concert garden in the afternoon, and read after tea. I am quite well satisfied with my progress in the noble German tongue, which has been steady, although, since the first day I wrote to you about [it], not brilliant. Its difficulties are I think quite unjustifiably great for a modern language--it is in fact without _any_ of the modern improvements. I read the little newspapers, which Dr. Semler takes, carefully from beginning to end; and what with the other newspapers I see at a reading-room, the talk I hear, and a little other reading, I have a quite vague and confused but very wonderful impression of the strange difference between the whole German way of thinking and ours; and in my as yet crude fancy it seems to be connected with the grammatical structure of the sentences and the endless power of making new words by combination. I have just been reading Hegel's chapter on epic poetry in his "Aesthetik," and [the] truly monstrous sentences therein were quite a revelation to me. It seems to me that the expression corresponds much more closely to the spontaneous and impromptu mode of thought than in our Latinized tongues--that the language allows and invites speculation and expatiation without limit. As soon as the first glimmering of an idea has dawned upon you, there is no reason why you should not begin to inscribe, for you can wallow round and round as you proceed, affixing limitations, lugging in definitions and explanations as fast as they suggest each other, and need never go back to reshape your beginning. While with us you will, as a rule, come to grief if you begin your sentence without a pretty distinct idea of what the whole is going to be. Then the endless power of word-multiplication by composition, and of making adjectives of whole phrases must allow you to _fix_, and to fix in a most homely, pregnant form, a host of evanescent shades of meaning (most of which would with us be lost), as fast as they flash upon the mind. And from these successive approximations the final form of the thought may be more easily and surely distilled than if it had to be all formed in one's head before it could get even an approximate expression. However, I don't pretend to say that these hasty impressions are correct. They may be the mere creations of a distempered fancy. At any rate, I am sure that German is the native tongue of all Wilky-isms, and that in Germany [Wilky] would be one of the first authors of the age for style. The mischief of it is that, instead of using these approximations as such, the people let them stand permanently, and as they can make them with so little trouble, there arises in literature and talk an entangled mass of crudity and barbarism that spoils everything. They get accustomed to such elephantine ways of saying things that they don't mind it at all, and I have had more amusement out of the newspaper than I ever derived from the text of "Punch." I wish I could remember some of the expressions. Yesterday, for instance, the paper said the Emperor of Austria's message was more _atomistisch_ than _dynamisch_--this, in a peppery little political article, shows what scholastic expressions the people are accustomed to. The context gave no explanation. Then, a couple of days ago, in a review of some histories of German literature, the surprising depth of one author was praised, altho' it was granted "that _here and there_ he had not succeeded in lighting up the ultimate life-spring (_Lebensgrund_) of the phenomena." Of another that "_without entirely losing sight of what was human_ (_menschlich_) in the phenomena, he had accomplished a work of extraordinarily logical development and luminous procedure (_Gang_)." Imagine entirely leaving out the human in a history of _literature_!... * * * * * _May 30._ The pleasant spinster from Hamburg I mentioned in my last letter as being so well read, has, I find, "drawn the line" of her information at geography and physical science. She comes out strong in Sanscrit and Greek literature (which she knows of course by translations), and in church history, but she drives me frantic by her endless talking about America, in the course of which she continually leaps without any warning from New York to Rio de Janeiro and thence to Valparaiso. She has friends in each of these localities, and it is apparently a fixed conviction of hers that they take tea together every evening. At first I tried to show her that these places were all far apart and that the ways of one were not those of the others, and from her apparent comprehension and submission I used to fancy I had succeeded; but it was only the elastic and transient bowing of the reed before the gale. A rather amusing incident occurred the other evening. I was speaking of the different classes of people that made up our population, and endeavoring to give a keen analysis of the Irish character, when she asked me to tell her something about a people we had with us called "Yankees," about whom she had heard such strange stories, and who seemed to be, if report were true, of all the peoples in the world the very worst (_das allerschlimmste_). What was their genesis and what were they? Imagine the feelings of the poor old lady, who had asked the question merely from a wish to please me by her intelligent interest in our affairs, when the truth was told her.... The other afternoon I fell into conversation with a tall and rather aristocratic-looking old gentleman with a gray moustache, who spoke very good French, at a beer garden, and found out afterwards that he was no less a person than the illustrious Kaulbach. Strangely enough, we quite accidentally got on the subject of the Gallery. He spoke of several of the pictures, but said nothing that was not commonplace. I have as yet only had a mere glimpse at the Gallery, but will do it thoroughly before I leave. I'd give anything if Harry could see some of the Venetian things there, and the Shepherds' Adoration of Correggio, which he probably knows, or rather _méconnaît_, by prints which give nought but the rather unpleasant and, unless you are let into the secret, motivelessly eccentric drawing. But it would take Victor Hugo to find the proper antithetic epithets to describe the combined gladness and solemnity of the painting, its innocence and its depth. I have always had, I don't know why, a prejudice against Correggio; but I never saw a painting before that breathed out so easily such a moral poetry. It seems to me to kill Rafael's celebrated Madonna right out. Although that too is a good "piece." I find myself in the Gallery much too disposed to exalt one thing at the expense of its neighbors, which is very unjust to them; but by taking it easily and letting the pictures do their own work I think it will all come right. Mr. Paul Veronese had _eyes_, anyhow. I am sure it would be the making of John La Farge to come abroad, alone, if no other way. Dis lui, Henry, que je lui écrirai tantôt à ce sujet. I have been having a literary debauch to start in the language with, but am getting down again to medicine. The enthusiastic, oratorical and eloquent Schiller, the wise and exquisite Goethe, and the virile and human Lessing have in turn held me entranced by their _Dramal_. Je te recommande, Henry, "Emilia Galotti" comme étude. C'est serré comme du chêne, rapide comme l'avalanche, toute la retenue et la vigueur de Merimée, et au fond un gros coeur dont la tendresse comprimée n'échappe que par des phrases dont la sobriété même déchire, ou bien par du bitter irony. Lessing seems to have a religious feeling that people miss in Goethe, and seems to be a great deal deeper than Schiller, though, of course, he is a far more homespun character. I have been reading Goethe's "Italienische Reise." It is perfectly fascinating; but you can read very little of it at a time, it is so damnably tedious, and you can't bear to skip. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is a deal of _naïveté_ in the old cuss. Attends donc un peu que mon grand article sur Goethe apparaisse dans "L'Américain du Nord!" I expect T. S. Perry here in a fortnight on his way from Venice. You may imagine with what joy. I have just been interrupted by the supper, which takes place at nine P.M. and consists of beer, eggs, herrings, ham, and bread and butter, and is not displeasing to the carnal man. I have been writing a most infernally long letter, for which I apologize. It will be the last time. The fact is I have so few resources here that I am driven to write. Tell Alice that there are two Miss Twomblys from Boylston Street living here, one exceedingly pretty. She doubtless, by her feminine system of espionage, knows who they are, though I know none of their friends and they none of mine. I got mother's letter and the "Nation" with great joy soon after my arrival. I read Father's article, but with much the old result. I am desirous of reading his article in the N. A. R. and hope he will not delay to send it when it appears. Heaps of love all round. _To his Mother._ DRESDEN, _June 12, 1867_. DEAREST MOTHER,--I have been reading a considerable deal of German, and in a very desultory way, as I want to get accustomed to a variety of styles, so as to be able to read any book at sight, skipping the useless; and I may say that I now begin to have that power whenever the book is writ in a style at all adapted to the requirements of the human, as distinguished from the German, mind. The profounder and more philosophical German requires, however, that you should bring all the resources of your nature, of every kind, to a focus, and hurl them again and again on the sentence, till at last you feel something give way, as it were, and the Idea begins to unravel itself. As for speaking, that is a very different matter and advances much more slowly.... Life is so monotonous in this place that unless I make some philosophical discoveries, or unless _something_ happens, my letters will have to be both few and short. I get up and have breakfast, which means a big cup of cocoa and some bread and butter with an egg, if I want it, at eight. I read till half-past one, when dinner, which is generally quite a decent meal; after dinner a nap, more _Germanorum_ and more read till the sun gets low enough to go out, when out I go--generally to the Grosser Garten, a lovely park outside the town where the sun slants over the greenest meadows and sends his shafts between the great trees in a most wholesome manner. There are some spots where the trees are close together, and in their classic gloom you find mossy statues, so that you feel as if you belonged to the last century. Often I go and sit on a terrace which overlooks the Elbe and, with my eyes bent upon the lordly cliffs far down the river on the other side, with strains of the sweetest music in my ear, and with pint after pint of beer successively finding their way into the fastnesses of my interior, I enjoy most delightful reveries, _au nombre desquels_ those concerning my home and my sister are not the least frequent. In the house (which stands on a corner) my great resource when time hangs heavy on my hands is to sit in the window and examine my neighbors. The houses are all four stories high and composed of separate flats, as in Paris. I live in the 3me. Diagonally opposite is a young ladies' boarding-school where the _young_ ladies, very young they are, are wont to relax from their studies by kissing their hands, etc., etc., etc., to a young English lout, who has been here in the house, and myself. Said lout left for England yesterday, for which I heartily thank him, and I shall now monopolize the attention of the school. We rather _had_ them, for we had a telescope to observe them by. Not one was good-looking. There has, however, lately arisen in the Christian Strasse, just under my window, a most ravishing apparition, and I begin to think my heart will not wither wholly away. About eighteen, hair like night, and _such_ eyes! Their mute-appealing, love-lorn look goes through and through me. Every day for the last week, after dinner, have I sat in my window and she in hers. I with the telescope! she with those eyes! and we communing with each other!! I will try to make a likeness of her and send with this letter, but I may not succeed.[36] She has only one defect, which is the length of her nose. If that were only an inch and a half shorter, I should propose at once to her Mother for it; but religious difference might intervene, so it is better as it is. I am expecting T. S. Perry any day now, you may imagine how impatiently.... Tell Harry I have been reading some essays by Fr. Theod. Vischer, the _bedeutende Esthetiker_, on Strauss, on Goethe's "Faust" and its critics, etc., etc., which have much interested me. He is a splendid writer for style and matter--as brilliant as any of the non-absolutely-harlequin Frenchmen. The foundation of the thought is, or at least appears to be to my untutored mind, Hegelian; but they were published in 1844 and he may have changed. His "Aesthetik" henceforward appears in the list of "books which I must some day read." Some of the commentaries there quoted on "Faust" are incredibly monstrous for ponderous imbecility and seeing everything in the universe and out of it, except the point. I read this morning an Essay of Kuno Fischer's on Lessing's "Nathan"--one of the parasitic and analytic sort on the whole, but still very readable. The way these cusses slip so fluently off into the "Ideal," the "Jenseitige," the "Inner," etc., etc., and undertake to give a _logical_ explanation of everything which is so palpably trumped up _after_ the facts, and the reasoning of which is so grotesquely incapable of going an inch into the future, is both disgusting and disheartening. You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn till night is their happy occupation. There is something that strikes me as corrupt, immodest in this incessant taste for explaining things in this mechanical way; but the era of it may be past now--I don't know. I speak only of æsthetic matters, of course. The political moment both here and in Austria is extremely interesting to one who has a political sense, and even I am beginning to have an opinion--and one all in favor of Prussia's victory and supremacy as a great practical stride towards civilization. I think the French tone in the last quarrel deserved a degrading and stinging humiliation as much as anything in history ever did, and I'm very sorry they did not get it. Of course there's no end of bunkum and inflation here, too, but it is practically a healthy thing.... _To his Father._ BERLIN, _Sept. 5, 1867_. MY BELOVED OLD DAD,--...I think it will be just as well for you not to say anything to any of the others about what I shall tell you of my condition hitherto, as it will only give them useless pain, and poor Harry especially (who evidently from his letters runs much into that utterly useless emotion, sympathy, with me) had better remain ignorant.... My confinement to my room and inability to indulge in any social intercourse drove me necessarily into reading a great deal, which in my half-starved and weak condition was very bad for me, making me irritable and tremulous in a way I have never before experienced. Two evenings which I spent out, one at Gerlach's, the other at Thies's, aggravated my dorsal symptoms very much, and as I still clung to the hope of amelioration from repose, I avoided going out to the houses where it was possible. Although I cannot exactly say that I got low-spirited, yet thoughts of the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention, and I began to think that some change, even if a hazardous one, was necessary. It was at that time that Dr. Carus advised Teplitz. While there, owing to the weakening effects of the baths, both back and stomach got worse if anything; but the beautiful country and a number of drives which I thought myself justified in taking made me happy as a king.... I have purposely hitherto written fallacious accounts of my state home, to produce a pleasant impression on you all--but you may rely on the present one as literally certain, and as it makes the others after all only _premature_, I don't see what will be the use of impairing the family confidence in my letters by saying anything about it to them. I have no doubt that you will consider the Teplitz expenditure justified, as I do. My sickness has added some other items in the way of medicine and cab hire to the expenses of my life in Dresden, but nothing _very_ considerable. So much for biz. I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times carefully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has always hung over what you have written on these subjects is hardly at all cleared up. Every sentence seems written from a point of view which I nowhere get within range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of questions which are visible from my present view. My questions, I know, belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal entirely with the "natural constitution" of things; but I find it impossible to step out from them into relation with "spiritual" facts, and the very language you use _ontologically_ is also so extensively rooted in the finite and phenomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its mechanical sense, when it becomes to me devoid of significance. I feel myself in fact more and more drifting towards the sensationalism closed in by skepticism--but the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst of it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking I may one day get a glimpse of things through the ontological window. At present it is walled up. I can understand now no more than ever the world-wide gulf you put between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably entangled together, and seem to grow from a common stem--and _no_ theory of creation seems to me to make things clearer. I cannot logically understand _your_ theory. You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which the _alienation_ is produced (but phenomenal to _what_? to the already unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected alienation a _real_ movement of return follows. But how _can_ the real movement have its rise in the phenomenal? And if it does not, it seems to me the creation is the very arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole process is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand what you mean by the descent of the creator into nature; you don't explain it, and it seems to be the kernel of the whole. You speak sometimes of our natural life as our whole conscious life; sometimes of our consciousness as composed of both elements, finite and infinite. If our _real_ life is unconscious, I don't see how you can occupy in the final result a different place from the Stoics, for instance. These are points on which I have never understood your position, and they will doubtless make you smile at my stupidity; but I cannot help it. I ought not to write about them in such a hurry, for I have been expecting every moment to see Tom Dwight come in, with whom I promised to go to the theatre. I arrived here late last night. My back will prevent my studying physiology this winter at Leipsig, which I rather hoped to do. I shall stay here if I can. If unable to live here and cultivate the society of the natives without a greater moral and dorsal effort than my shattered frame will admit, I will retreat to Vienna where, knowing so many Americans, I shall find social relaxation without much expense of strength. Dwight has come. Much love from your affectionate, WM. JAMES. _To O. W. Holmes, Jr._ BERLIN, _Sept. 17, 1867_. MY DEAR WENDLE,--I was put in the possession, this morning, by a graceful and unusual attention on the part of the postman, of a letter from home containing, amongst other valuable matter, a precious specimen of manuscript signed "O. W. H. Jr." covering just one page of small note paper belonging to a letter written by Minny Temple!!!!! Now I myself am not proud,--poverty, misery and philosophy have together brought me to a pass where there are few actions so shabby that I would not commit them if thereby I could relieve in any measure my estate, or lighten the trouble of living,--but, by Jove, Sir! there _is_ a point, _sunt_ certi denique fines, down to which it seems to me hardly worth while to condescend--better give up altogether.--I do not intend any personal application. Men differ, thank Heaven! and there may be some constituted in such a fearful and wonderful manner, that to write to a friend after six months, in another person's letter, hail him as "one of the pillars on which life rests," and after twelve lines stop short, seems to them an action replete with beauty and credit. To me it is otherwise. And if perchance, O Wendy boy, there lurked in any cranny of _thy_ breast a spark of consciousness, a germ of shame at the paltriness of thy procedure as thou inditedst that pitiful apology for a letter, I would fain fan it, nourish it, till thy whole being should become one incarnate blush, one crater of humiliation. Mind, I should not have found fault with you if you had not written at all. There would have been a fine brutality about that which would have commanded respect rather than otherwise--certainly not _pity_. 'Tis that, _writing_, THAT should be the result. Bah! But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to provoke you to recrimination in your next letter. Let it be as substantial and succulent as the last, with its hollow hyperbolic expression of esteem, was the opposite, and I assure you that the past shall be forgotten.--I am, as you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck," bodily. I left home without telling anyone about it, because, hoping I might get well, I wanted to keep it a secret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I thought of telling you "in confidence," but refrained, partly because walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because of the habit of secrecy that had grown on me in six months. I dare say Harry has kept you supplied with information respecting my history up to the present time, and perhaps read you portions of my letters. My history, internal and external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally uneventful. The external, with the exception of three R. R. voyages (to and from Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles that of a sea anemone; and the internal, notwithstanding the stimulus of a new language and country, has contracted the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to be the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and solitude; and when the bodily condition is such that muscular and cerebral activity not only remain _unexcited_, but are _solicited_, by an idiotic hope of recovery, to crass indolence, the "elasticity" of one's spirits can't be expected to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired Harry's pluck more and more. _Pain_, however intense, is light and life, compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct, and where your "conscience," in the form of an aspiration towards recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced "must be felt to be appreciated." I have been in this city ten days and hope to stay all winter. I have got a comfortable room near the University and will attempt to follow some of the lectures. My wish was to study physiology practically, but I shall not be able. The number of subjects and fractions of subjects on which courses of lectures are given here and at the other universities would make you stare. Berlin is a "live" place, with a fine, tall, intelligent-looking population, infinitely better-looking than that of Dresden. I like the Germans very much, so far (which is not far at all) as I have got to know them. The apophthegm, "a fat man consequently a good man," has much of truth in it. The Germans come out strong on their abdomens,--even when these are not vast in capacity, one feels that they are of mighty powerful construction, and play a much weightier part in the economy of the man than with us,--affording a massive, immovable background to the consciousness, over which, as on the surface of a deep and tranquil sea, the motley images contributed by the other senses to life's drama glide and play without raising more than a pleasant ripple,--while with _us_, who have no such voluminous background, they forever touch bottom, or come out on the other side, or kick up such a tempest and fury that we enjoy no repose. The Germans have leisure, kindness to strangers, a sort of square honesty, and an absence of false shame and damned pecuniary pretension that makes intercourse with them very agreeable. The language is infernal; and I seem to be making no progress beyond the stage in which one just begins to misunderstand and to make one's self misunderstood. The scientific literature is even richer than I thought. In literature proper, Goethe's "Faust" seems to me almost worth learning the language for. I wish I could communicate to you some startling discoveries regarding our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos, made since I have been here. But I actually haven't had a fresh idea. And my reading until six weeks ago, having been all in German, covered very little ground. For the past six weeks I have, by medical order, been relaxing my brain on French fiction, and am just returning to the realities of life, German and Science. If you want to be consoled, refreshed, and reconciled to the Kosmos, the whole from a strictly abdominal point of view, read "L'Ami Fritz," and "Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette," etc., by Erckmann-Chatrian. They are books of gold, so don't read them till you are just in the mood and all other wisdom is of no avail. Then they will open the skies to you. On looking back over this letter I perceive I have unwittingly been betrayed into a more gloomy tone than I intended, and than would convey a faithful impression of my usual mental condition--in which occur moments of keen enjoyment. The contemplation of my letter of credit alone makes me chuckle for hours. If I ever have leisure I will write an additional Bridgewater, illustrating the Beneficence and Ingenuity, etc., in providing me with a letter of credit when so many poor devils have none. There, I have again unintentionally fallen into a vein of irony--I do not mean it. I am full of hope in the future. My back, etc., are far better since I have been in Teplitz; in fact I feel like a new man. I have several excellent letters to people here, and when they return from the country, when T. S. Perry arrives for the winter, when the lectures get a-going, and I get thinking again, when long letters from you and the rest of my "_friends_" (ha! ha!) arrive regularly at short intervals--I shall mock the state of kings. You had better believe I have thought of you with affection at intervals since I have been away, and prized your qualities of head, heart, and person, and my priceless luck in possessing your confidence and friendship in a way I never did at home; and cursed myself that I didn't make more of you when I was by you, but, like the base Indian, threw evening after evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom, your golden jibes, your costly imagery, listening to your shuddering laughter, baptizing myself afresh, in short, in your friendship--the thought of all this makes me even now forget your epistolary peculiarities. But pray, my dear old Wendell, let me have _one_ letter from you--tell me how your law business gets on, of your adventures, thoughts, discoveries (even though but of mares' nests, they will be interesting to your Williams); books read, good stories heard, girls fallen in love with--nothing can fail to please me, except your failing to write. Please give my love to John Gray, Jim Higginson and Henry Bowditch. Tell H. B. I will write to him very soon; but that is no reason why he should not write to me without waiting, and tell me about himself and medicine in Boston. Give my very best regards also to your father, mother and sister. And believe me ever your friend, WM. JAMES. P. S. Why can't you write me the result of your study of the _vis viva_ question? I have not thought of it since I left. I wish very much you would, if the trouble be not too great. Anyhow you could write the central formulas without explication, and oblige yours. Excuse the scrawliness of this too hurriedly written letter. _To Henry James._ BERLIN, _Sept. 26, 1867_. BELOVED 'ARRY,--I hope you will not be severely disappointed on opening this fat envelope to find it is not all _letter_. I will first explain to you the nature of the enclosed document and then proceed to personal matters. The other day, as I was sitting alone with my deeply breached letter of credit, beweeping my outcast state, and wondering what I could possibly do for a living, it flashed across me that I might write a "notice" of H. Grimm's novel which I had just been reading. To conceive with me is to execute, as you well know. And after sweating fearfully for three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying, etc., etc., I have just succeeded in finishing the enclosed. I want you to read it, and if, after correcting the style and thoughts, with the aid of Mother, Alice and Father, and rewriting it if possible, you judge it to be capable of interesting in any degree anyone in the world but H. Grimm, himself, to send it to the "Nation" or the "Round Table." I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this price. Style is not my forte, and to strike the mean between pomposity and vulgar familiarity is indeed difficult. Still, an the rich guerdon accrue, an but ten beauteous dollars lie down on their green and glossy backs within the family treasury in consequence of my exertions, I shall feel glad that I have made them. I have not seen Grimm yet as he is in Switzerland. In his writings he is possessed of real imagination and eloquence, chiefly in an ethical line, and the novel is really _distingué_, somewhat as Cherbuliez's are, only with rather a deficiency on the physical and animal side. He is, to my taste, too idealistic, and Father would scout him for his arrant moralism. Goethe seems to have mainly suckled him, and the manner of this book is precisely that of "Wilhelm Meister" or "Elective Affinities." There is something not exactly _robust_ about him, but, _per contra_, great delicacy and an extreme belief in the existence and worth of truth and desire to attain it justly and impartially. In short, a rather painstaking liberality and want of careless animal spirits--which, by the bye, seem to be rather characteristics of the rising generation. But enough of him. The notice was mere taskwork. I could not get up a spark of interest in it, and I should not think it would be _d'actualité_ for the "Nation." Still, I could think of nothing else to do, and was bound to do something.[37] ... I am a new man since I have been here, both from the ruddy hues of health which mantle on my back, and from the influence of this live city on my spirits. Dresden was a place in which it always seemed afternoon; and as I used to sit in my cool and darksome room, and see through the ancient window the long dusty sunbeams slanting past the roof angles opposite down into the deep well of a street, and hear the distant droning of the market and think of no reason why it should not thus continue _in secula seculorum_, I used to have the same sort of feeling as that which now comes over me when I remember days passed in Grandma's old house in Albany. Here, on the other hand, it is just like home. Berlin, I suppose, is the most American-looking city in Europe. In the quarter which I inhabit, the streets are all at right angles, very broad, with dusty trees growing in them, houses all new and flat-roofed, covered with stucco, and of every imaginable irregularity in height, bleak, ugly, unsettled-looking--_werdend_. Germany is, I find, as a whole (I hardly think more experience will change my opinion), very nearly related to our country, and the German nature and ours so akin in fundamental qualities, that to come here is not much of an experience. There is a general colorlessness and bleakness about the outside look of life, and in artistic matters a wide-spread manifestation of the very same creative spirit that designs our kerosene-lamp models, for instance, at home. Nothing in short that is worth making a pilgrimage to see. To travel in Italy, in Egypt, or in the Tropics, may make creation widen to one's view; but to one of our race all that is _peculiar_ in Germany is mental, and _that_ Germany can be brought to us.... (_After dinner._) I have just been out to dine. I am gradually getting acquainted with all the different restaurants in the neighborhood, of which there are an endless number, and will presently choose one for good,--certainly not the one where I went today, where I paid 25 _Groschen_ for a soup, chicken and potatoes, and was almost prevented from breathing by the damned condescension of the waiters. I fairly sigh for a home table. I used to find a rather pleasant excitement in dining "round," that is long since played out. Could I but find some of the honest, florid and ornate ministers that wait on you at the Parker House, here, I would stick to their establishment, no matter what the fare. These indifferent reptiles here, dressed in cast-off wedding-suits, insolent and disobliging and always trying to cheat you in the change, are the plague of my life. After dinner I took quite a long walk under the Linden and round by the Palace and Museum. There are great numbers of statues (a great many of them "equestrian") here, and you have no idea how they light up the place. What you say about the change of the seasons wakens an echo in my soul. Today is really a harbinger of winter, and felt like an October day at home, with a northwest wind, cold and crisp with a white light, and the red leaves falling and blowing everywhere. I expect T. S. Perry in a week. We shall have a very good large parlor and bedroom, _together_, in this house, and steer off in fine style right into the bowels of the winter. I expect it to be a stiff one, as everyone speaks of it here with a certain solemnity.... I wish you would articulately display to me in your future letters the names of all the books you have been reading. "A great many books, none but good ones," is provokingly vague. On looking back at what _I_ have read since I left home, it shows exceeding small, owing in great part I suppose to its being in German. I have just got settled down again--after a nearly-two-months' debauch on French fiction, during which time Mrs. Sand, the fresh, the bright, the free; the somewhat shrill but doughty Balzac, who has risen considerably in my esteem or rather in my affection; Théophile Gautier the good, the golden-mouthed, in turn captivated my attention; not to speak of the peerless Erckmann-Chatrian, who renews one's belief in the succulent harmonies of creation--and a host of others. I lately read Diderot, "OEuvres Choisies," 2 vols., which are entertaining to the utmost from their animal spirits and the comic modes of thinking, speaking and behaving of the time. Think of meeting continually such delicious sentences as this,--he is speaking of the educability of beasts,--"Et peut-on savoir jusqu'où l'usage des mains porterait les singes s'ils avaient le loisir comme la faculté d'inventer, et si la frayeur continuelle que leur inspirent les hommes ne les retenait dans l'abrutissement"!!! But I must pull up, as I have to write to Father still.... Adieu, lots of love from your aff. WILHELM. * * * * * The preceding letter shows James as but recently arrived in Berlin and as arranging himself there for a winter of physiology at the University. He was soon joined by his young compatriot Thomas Sergeant Perry, an intimate friend of earlier Newport days and of the subsequent Boston and Cambridge years, and the two young Americans set up joint lodgings at Number 12 in the Mittelstrasse. Although James's main purpose was to work at the University, he was luckily not without social resources. George Bancroft, the historian and former Secretary of the Navy and Minister to England, was at this time representing the United States in Berlin and was an old family acquaintance. His and another hospitable family, the Louis Thieses, who had been Cambridge neighbors and whose house in Quincy Street the James parents had acquired upon Mr. Thies's return to his native land, were a link with home, and at the same time rendered hospitable services to James by helping him to a few German acquaintances. By far the most congenial and interesting of these was Herman Grimm, the son of the younger of the universally beloved brothers of the Fairy Tales. Herman Grimm had married Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, and was at this time a man of just past forty years. Professor of the History of Art in the University of Berlin, essayist, author of "The Life of Michael Angelo" and of Lectures on Goethe as well as of several works of fiction, Grimm was a versatile and charming specimen of that "learned" Germany which we now think of as flourishing most amiably during the generation that preceded the Franco-Prussian War. The easy and cordial way in which his household accepted James appears, as in the next letter, to have been richly appreciated. _To his Sister._ BERLIN, _Oct. 17, 1867_. Your excellent long letter of September 5 reached me in due time. If about that time you felt yourself strongly hugged by some invisible spiritual agency, you may now know that it was _me_. What would not I give if you could pay me a visit here! Since I last wrote home the lingual Rubicon has been passed, and I find to my surprise that I can speak German--certainly not in an ornamental manner, but there is hardly anything which I would not dare to attempt to _begin_ to say and be pretty sure that a kind providence would pull me through, somehow or other. I made the discovery at my first visit to Grimm a fortnight ago, and have confirmed it several times since. I can likewise understand educated people perfectly. I feel my German as old Moses used to feel his oats, and for ten days past have walked along the street dandling my head in a fatuous manner that rivets the attention of the public. The University lectures were to have begun this week, but the lazy professors have put it off to the last of the month. [Illustration: Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book.] I will describe to you the manner in which I spent yesterday. _Ex uno disce omnes_--(a German proverb). I awoke at half-past eight at the manly voice of T. S. Perry caroling his morning hymn from his neighboring bed--if the instrument of torture the Germans sleep in be worthy of that name. After some preliminary conversation we arose, performed our washing, each in a couple of tumblers full of water in a little basin of this shape [sketch], donned our clothes, and stepped into our SALON into which the morning sun was streaming and adding its genial warmth to that of the great porcelain stove, into which the maid had put the handful of fuel (which, when ignited, makes the stove radiate heat for twelve hours) the while we slumbered. T. S. P. found on the table a letter from [Moorfield] Storey, which the same vigilant maid had placed there, and I the morning paper, full of excitement about the Italian affairs and the diabolical designs of Napoleon on Germany. After a breakfast of cocoa, eggs and excellent rolls, I finished the paper, and took up my regular reading, while T. S. P. worked at his German lesson. I finished the chapter in a treatise on Galvanism which bears the neat and concise title of [_not deciphered_]. By 10 o'clock T. S. P. had gone to his German lesson, and it was about time for me to rig up to go to Grimm's to dine, having received a kind invitation the day before. As I passed through the pleasant wood called the "Thiergarten," which was filled with gay civil and military cavaliers, I looked hard for the imposing equestrian figure of the Hon. Geo. Bancroft; but he was not to be seen. I got safely to Grimm's, and in a moment the other guest arrived. Herr Professor----, whose name I could not catch,[38] a man of a type I have never met before. He is writing now a life of Schleiermacher of which one volume is published. A soft fat man with black hair (somewhat the type of the photographs of Renan), of a totally uncertain age between 25 and 40, with little bits of green eyes swimming in their fat-filled orbits, and the rest of his face quite "realizing one's idea" of the infant Bacchus. I, with my usual want of enterprise, have neglected hitherto to provide myself with a swallow-tailed coat; but I had a resplendent fresh-biled shirt and collar, while the Professor, who wore the "obligatory coat," etc., had an exceedingly grimy shirt and collar and a rusty old rag of a cravat. Which of us most violated the proprieties I know not, but your feminine nature will decide. Grimm wore a yellowish, greenish, brownish coat whose big collar and cuffs and enormous flaps made me strongly suspect it had been the property of the brothers Grimm, who had worn it on state occasions, and dying, bequeathed it to Herman. The dinner was very good. The Prof. was overflowing with information with regard to everything knowable and unknowable. He is the first man I have ever met of a class, which must be common here, of men to whom learning has become as natural as breathing. A learned man at home is in a measure isolated; his study is carried on in private, at reserved hours. To the public he appears as a citizen and neighbor, etc., and they know at most _about_ him that he is addicted to this or that study; his intellectual occupation always has something of a put-on character, and remains external at least to some part of his being. Whereas this cuss seemed to me to be nothing if not a professor ... [_line not deciphered_] as if he were able to stand towards the rest of society _merely_ in the relation of a man learned in this or that branch--and never for a moment forget the interests or put off the instincts of his specialty. If he should meet people or circumstances that could in no measure be dealt with on that ground, he would pass on and ignore them, instead of being obliged, like an American, to sink for the time the specialty. He talked and laughed incessantly at table, related the whole history of Buddhism to Mrs. Grimm, and I know not what other points of religious history. After dinner Mrs. Grimm went, at the suggestion of her husband, to take a nap ... [_line not deciphered_] while G. and the Professor engaged in a hot controversy about the natural primitive forms of religion, Grimm inclining to the view that the historically first form must have been monotheistic. I noticed the Professor's replies grow rather languid, when suddenly his fat head dropped forward, and G. cried out that he had better take a good square nap in the arm-chair. He eagerly snatched at the proposal. Grimm got him a clean handkerchief, which he threw over his face, and presently he seemed to slumber. Grimm woke him in ten minutes to take some coffee. He rose, refreshed like a giant, and proceeded to fight with Grimm about the identity of Homer. Grimm has just been studying the question and thinks that the poems of Homer _must_ have been composed in a _written_ language. From there through a discussion about the madness of Hamlet--G. being convinced that Shakespeare _meant_ to mystify the reader, and intentionally constructed a riddle. The sun waned low and I took my leave in company with the Prof. We parted at the corner, _without_ the Prof. telling me (as an honest, hospitable American would have done) that he would be happy to see me at his domicile, so that I know not whether I shall be able to continue acquainted with a man I would fain know more of. I got into a droschke and, coming home, found T. S. P. in the room, and while telling him of the events of the dinner was interrupted by the entrance of the Rev. H. W. Foote of Stone Chapel.... The excellent little man had presented himself a few evenings before, bringing me from Dresden a very characteristic note from Elizabeth Peabody (in which among other things she says she is "on the wing for Italy"--she is as _folâtre_ a creature as your friend Mrs. W----), and we have dined together every day since, and had agreed to go to hear "Fidelio" together at the Opera that evening. Foote is really a good man and I shall prosecute his friendship every moment of his stay here; seems to have his mind open to every interest, and has a sweet modesty that endears him to the heart. He goes home next month. I advise Harry to call and see him; I know he will sympathize with him. T. S. P. never grows weary of repeating a pun of Ware's about him in Italy, who, when asked what had become of Foote (they traveled for a time together), replied: "I left him at the Hotel, hand in glove with the Bootts." "Fidelio" was truly musical. After it, I went to Zennig's restaurant (it was over by quarter before nine), where I had made a rendez-vous with a young Doctor to whom Mr. Thies had given me a letter. Having been away from Berlin, I had seen him for the first time the day before yesterday. He is a very swell young Jew with a gorgeous cravat, blue-black whiskers and oily ringlets, not prepossessing; and we had made this appointment. I waited half an hour and, the faithless Israelite not appearing, came home, and after reading a few hours went to bed. _Two hours later._ I have just come in from dinner, a ceremony which I perform at the aforesaid Zennig's, Unter den Linden. (By the bye, you must not be led by that name to imagine, as I always used to, an avenue over-shadowed by patriarchal lime trees, whose branches form a long arch. The "Linden" are two rows of small, scrubby, abortive horse-chestnuts, beeches, limes and others, planted like the trees in Commonwealth Avenue.) Zennig's is a table-d'hôte, so-called notwithstanding the unities of hour and table are violated. You have soup, three courses, and dessert or coffee and cheese for 12-1/2 Groschen if you buy 14 tickets, and I shall probably dine there all winter. We dined with Foote today, who spoke among other things of a new English novel whose heroine "had the bust and arms of the Venus of Milo." T. S. P. remarked that her having the arms might account for the Venus herself being without them. I enclose you the photograph of an actress here with whom I am in love. A neat coiffure, is it not? I also send you a couple more of my own precious portraits. I got them taken to fulfill a promise I had made to a young Bohemian lady at Teplitz, the niece of the landlady. Sweet Anna Adamowiz! (pronounce--_vitch_), which means descendant of Adam.--She belongs consequently to one of the very first families in Bohemia. I used to drive dull care away by writing her short notes in the Bohemian tongue such as; "Navzdy budes v me mysli Irohm pamatkou," _i.e._, forever bloomest thou in my memory;--"dej mne tooji bodo biznu," give me your photograph; and isolated phrases as "Mlaxik, Dicka, pritel, pritelkyne," _i.e._, Jüngling, Mädchen, Freund, Freundinn; "mi luja," I love, etc. These were carried to her by the chambermaid, and the style, a little more florid than was absolutely _required_ by mere courtesy, was excused by her on the ground of my limited acquaintance with the subtleties of the language. Besides, the sentiments were on the whole good and the error, if any, in the right direction. When she gave me her photograph (which I regret to say she spelt "fotokraft"!!!!) she made me promise to send her mine. _Hence_ mine. I have been this afternoon to get a dress-coat measured, which will doubtless be a comfort to you to know. I must now stop. G-- * * * * * I had got as far as the above _G_ when the faithless Israelite of yesterday evening came in. He gave a satisfactory explanation of his absence and has been making a very pleasant visit. He is coming back at nine o'clock to take us (after the German mode of exercising hospitality) to a tavern to meet some of his boon companions. I reckon he is a better fellow than he seemed at first sight. I will leave this letter open till tomorrow to let you know what happens at the tavern, and whether the boon companions are old-clothes men, or Christian gentlemen. Good-night, my darling sister! Sei tausend mal von mir geküsst.[39] Give my best love to Father, Mother, Aunt Kate, the boys and everyone. Ever yr. loving bro., WM. JAMES. * * * * * 11 P.M. Decidedly the Jew rises in my estimation. He treated us in the German fashion to a veal cutlet and a glass of beer which we paid for ourselves. His boon companions were apparently Christians of a half-baked sort. One who sat next to me was half drunk [and] insisted on talking the most hideous English. T. S. P., who necessarily took small part in the conversation, endeavored to explain to Selberg that he was a "skeleton at the banquet," but could not get through. I came to his assistance, but forgot, of course, the word "Skelett," and found nothing better to say than that he was a _vertebral column_ at their banquet, which classical allusion I do not think was understood by the Jew. The young men did not behave with the politeness and attention to us which would have been shown to two Germans by a similar crowd at home. Selberg himself however improved every minute, and I have no doubt will turn out a capital fellow. Excuse these scraps of paper, W. J. Good night. _To his Sister._ BERLIN, _Nov. 19, 1867_. S�SS BALCHEN!--I stump wearily up the three flights of stairs after my dinner to this lone room where no human company but a ghastly lithograph of Johannes Müller and a grinning skull are to cheer me. Out in the street the slaw and fine rain is falling as if it would never stop--the sky is low and murky, and the streets filled with water and that finely worked-up paste of mud which never is seen on our continent. For some time past I have thought with longing of the brightness and freshness of my home in New England--of the extraordinary, and in ordinary moments little appreciated, but sometimes-coming-across-you-and-striking-you-with-an-unexpected-sense-of-rich-privilege blessings of a mother's love (excuse my somewhat German style)--of the advantage of having a youthful-hearted though bald-headed father who looks at the Kosmos as if it had some life in it--of the delicious and respectable meals in the family circle with the aforesaid father telling touching horse-car anecdotes,[40] and the serene Harry dealing his snubs around--with a clean female handmaiden to wait, and an open fire to toast one's self at afterwards instead of one of these pallid porcelain monuments here,--with a whole country around you full of friends and acquaintances in whose company you can refresh your social nature, a library of books in the house and a still bigger one over the way,--and all the rest of it. The longer I live, the more inclined am I to value the domestic affections and to be satisfied with the domestic and citizenly virtues (probably only for the reason that I am temporarily debarred from exercising any of them, I blush to think). At any rate I feel _now_ and _here_ the absence of any object with which to start up some sympathy, and the feeling is real and unpleasant while it lasts. I ought not, I confess, to sing in this tune _today_, for before dinner I made a call on a young lady here (named Frl. Bornemann) whom I had met at Mrs. Grimm's and whom Mrs. G. had advised me to go and see. She lives with her brother, an _Advocat_. They are rich orflings, and I had really a friendly visit there and hope it may ripen into familiarity. I got on tolerably well with the German--only making one laughable mistake, viz. in talking of the shower of meteors, _Stern-schnuppen_, the other night to speak of the "Stern-schnupfen" (_Schnupfen_ = snuffles, catarrh). And this visit is the occasion of my writing this week to you. Frl. B. is intimate with Miss Thies, and hearing that we lived in their house, she was seized with an extremely German desire to have some ivy leaves or other leaves from the garden to surprise Miss Thies with on Christmas. Your young female heart will probably beat responsive to the project and _infallibly_ by return mail send the leaves. She only wants one or two. You might also send a board from the flooring, some old grass and bits of hay from the front "lawn," or cut out an eye from the "gal" who is so much "struck with them babies"[41] in the parlor. They would all awaken tender memories, I have no doubt. Now do not delay even for one day to execute this, Alice! but set about it now with this letter in your hand. You see there is no time to lose, and I am very anxious not to disappoint the excellent young lady. The few commissions and questions I have sent home have been so unnoticed and disregarded that I hardly hope for success this time. It has always been the way with me, however, from birth upwards, and Heaven forbid that I should now begin to complain! But lo! I here send another commission. I definitely appoint by name my father H. James, Senior, author of Substance & Shadder, etc., to perform it; and solemnly charge all the rest of you to be as lions in his path, as thorns upon his side, as lumps in his mashed potatoes, until he do it or write me Nay. 'Tis to send by post Cousin's lectures on Kant, and that other French translation of a German introduction to Kant, which he bought last winter! By return of mail! And if not convenient to send the books, to write me the name of the author of the last-mentioned one, which I have forgotten. It behooves me to learn something of the "Philosopher of Königsberg," and I want these to ease the way. I sincerely hope that these words may not be utterly thrown away. I got a letter from Mother the day after I wrote last week to Harry, without date, but written after the Tweedies' visit. I got this morning a "Nation" and the "advertisement" to Father's Essay on Swedenborg. In the latter the old lyre is twanged with a greater freshness and force than ever, so that even T. S. Perry was made to vibrate in unison with it. I wrote to Father three weeks ago respecting his former article. I hope the letter is by this time in his hands. I am very sorry the fat one went astray. It contained, _inter alia_, an account of my expenditure up to its time of writing. I would give a good deal to be able to enjoy as you are all doing the society of Venerable Brother Robertson. It is a great pity that we should get so estranged by separation from each other. I wish, now he's at home, he would once write to me. I have got tolerably well to work, and enjoy my lectures at the University intensely. Are the "Rainbows for Children" I see noticed in the "Nation" that old book by Mrs. Tappan? I hope Harry is not the person therein mentioned as having palmed off on Godkin a translation from the German as an original article on Thorwaldsen. You have not told me a word about the Tappans since I quit. I am very glad to hear of Aunt Kate's leg being so much better and staying so. Tell her I hope it has not been improving at the expense of her heart, as her long silence sometimes makes me shudderingly fear. Adieu. 1000 kisses to all, not forgetting Ellen.[42] Ever your Bruder, W. J. _To Thomas W. Ward._ [Fragment of a letter from Berlin, _circa Nov. 1867?_] ...I have begun going to the physiological lectures at the University. There are in all seven courses and four lectures. I take five courses and three lectures. There is a bully physiological laboratory, the sight of which, inaccessible as it is to me in my present condition, gave me a sharp pang. I have blocked out some reading in physiology and psychology which I hope to execute this winter--though reading German is still disgustingly slow.... It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science--some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness-at (in the shape of sense perceptions), and more may come of it. I am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope I live through this winter to go to them in the summer. From all this talk you probably think I am working straight ahead--towards a definite aim. Alas, no! I finger book-covers as ineffectually as ever. The fact is, this sickness takes all the spring, physical and mental, out of a man.... _To Thomas W. Ward._ BERLIN, _Nov. 7, 1867_. ...If six years ago I could have felt the same satisfied belief in the worthiness of a life devoted to simple, patient, monotonous, scientific labor day after day (without reference to its results) and at the same time have had some inkling of the importance and nature of _education_ (_i.e._, getting orderly habits of thought, and by intense exercise in a variety of different subjects, getting the mind supple and delicate and firm), I might be now on the path to accomplishing something some day, even if my health had turned out no better than it is. But my habits of mind have been so bad that I feel as if the greater part of the last ten years had been worse than wasted, and now have so little surplus of physical vigor as to shrink from trying to retrieve them. Too late! too late! If I had been _drilled_ further in mathematics, physics, chemistry, logic, and the history of metaphysics, and had established, even if only in my memory, a firm and thoroughly familiar _basis_ of knowledge in all these sciences (like the basis of human anatomy one gets in studying medicine), to which I should involuntarily refer all subsequently acquired facts and thoughts,--instead of having now to keep going back and picking up loose ends of these elements, and wasting whole hours in looking to see how the new facts are related to them, or whether they are related to them at all,--I might be steadily advancing.--But enough! Excuse the damned whine of this letter; I had no idea whatever of writing it when I sat down, but I am in a mood of indigestion and blueness. I would not send you the letter at all, were it not that I thought it might tempt you soon to write to me. You have no idea, my dear old Tom, how I long to hear a word about you.... _To Henry P. Bowditch._ BERLIN, _Dec. 12, 1867_. BESTER HEINRICH,--I have arrived safely on this side of the ocean and hasten to inform you of the fact.--What a fine pair of young men we are to write so punctually and constantly to each other!--I will not gall you by any sarcasms, however (I naturally think you are more to blame than myself), because (as you naturally are of a similar way of thinking) you might recriminate at great length in your next and much other to-me-more-agreeable matter be crowded out of your letter. Suffice [it] to say that I have thought of you continually, and with undiminished affection, since that bright April morn when we parted; but I am of such an invincibly inert nature as regards letter-writing that it takes a combination of outward and inward circumstances and motives that hardly ever happens, to start me. I wrote you a letter last summer, but destroyed it because I was in such doleful dumps while writing it that it would have given you too unpleasant an impression.... I live near the University, and attend all the lectures on physiology that are given there, but am unable to do anything in the Laboratory, or to attend the cliniques or Virchow's lectures and demonstrations, etc. Du Bois-Raymond, an irascible man of about forty-five, gives a very good and clear, yea, brilliant, series of five lectures a week, and two ambitious young Jews give six more between them which are almost as instructive. The opportunities for study here are superb, it seems to me. Whatever they may be in Paris, they can_not_ be better. The physiological laboratory, with its endless array of machinery, frogs, dogs, etc., etc., almost "bursts my gizzard," when I go by it, with vexation. The German language is not child's play. I have lately begun to understand almost everything I hear said around me; but I still speak "with a slight foreign accent," as you may suppose--and, with all my practice in reading, do not think I can read more than half as fast as in English. It is very discouraging to get over so little ground. But a steady boring away is bound to fetch it, I suppose; and it seems to me it is worth the trouble. The general level of thoroughness and exactness in scientific work here is beyond praise; and the abundance of books on every division of every subject something we English have no idea of. It all comes from the thorough mode of educating the people from childhood up. The _Staats Examina_, before passing which no doctor can practise here in Prussia, exact an amount of physiological, and what we at home call "merely theoretical" knowledge of the candidate, which a young doctor at home would claim and receive especial distinction for having made himself master of. But the men here think it but fair; gird about their loins and set about working their way through. The general impression the Germans make on me is not at all that of a remarkably intellectually gifted people; and if they are not so, their eminence must come solely from their habits of conscientious and plodding work. It may be that their expressionless faces do their minds injustice. I don't know enough of them to decide. But I know the work is a large factor in the result. It makes one repine at the way he has been brought up, to come here. Unhappily most of us come too late to profit by what we see. Bad habits are formed, and life hurries us on too much to stop and drill. But it seems to me that the fact of so many American students being here of late years (they outnumber greatly all other foreign students) ought to have a good influence on the training of the succeeding generation with us. Tuck, Dwight, Dick Derby, Quincy, Townsend, and Heaven knows how many more are in Vienna. Tuck and Dwight write me that they are getting on remarkably well. I saw them both here in September and think T. D. improves a good deal as he grows older. Berlin is a bleak and unfriendly place. The inhabitants are rude and graceless, but must conceal a solid worth beneath it. I only know seven of them, and they are of the _élite_. It is very hard getting acquainted with them, as you have to make all the advances yourself; and your antagonist shifts so between friendliness and a drill sergeant's formal politeness that you never know exactly on what footing you stand with him. These Prussians bow in the most amusing way you ever saw,--as if an invisible hand suddenly punched them in the abdomen and an equally invisible foot forthwith kicked them in the rear,--one time and two motions, and they do it 100 times a day. But enough of national gossip--let us return to that about individuals. Oh! that I could see thy prominent nose and thy sagacious eyes at this moment relieved against the back of that empty arm-chair that stands opposite this table. Oh! that we might once again sit apart from the fretful and insipid herd of our congeners, and take counsel together concerning the world and life--our lives in particular, and all life in general. How the shy goddess would tremble in her hiding-places at the sound of our unerringly approaching voices. And how you would pour into my astonished ear all that is new and wonderful about pathology and microscopical research, all that is sound and neat about operative surgery, while I would recite the most thrilling chapters of Kolliker's "Entwickelungs-geschichte," or Helmholtz's "Innervationsfortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeitsbestimmungen"! I suppose you have been rolling on like a great growing snowball through the vast fields of medical knowledge and are fairly out of the long tunnel of low spirits that leads there by this time. It is only three months since I have taken up medical reading, as I made all sorts of excursions into the language when I came here, and, owing to the slowness of progression I spoke of above, I have not got over much ground. Of course I can never hope to practise; but I shall graduate on my return, and perhaps pick up a precarious and needy living by doing work for medical periodicals or something of that kind--though I hate writing as I do the foul fiend. But I don't want to break off connexion with biological science. I can't be a teacher of physiology, pathology, or anatomy; for I can't do laboratory work, much less microscopical or anatomical. I may get better, but hardly before it will be too late for me to begin school again. I'll tell you what let's do! Set up a partnership, you to run around and attend to the patients while I will stay at home and, reading everything imaginable in English, German, and French, distil it in a concentrated form into your mind. This division of labor will give the firm an immense advantage over all of our wooden-headed contemporaries. For, in your person, it will have more experience than any one else has time to acquire; and in mine, more learning. We will divide the profits equally, of course; and he who survives the other (you, probably) will inherit the whole. Does not the idea tempt you? If you don't like it, I'll go you halves in the profits in any other feasible way. Seriously, you see I have no very definite plans for the future; but I have enough to keep body and soul together for some years to come, and I see no need of providing for more. This talk of course is only for your "private ear." I want you to write immediately on receipt of this,--for if you don't then, you never will,--and tell me all about what you've been doing and learning and what your future plans are. Also, gossip about the School and Hospital. I have not had a chance to talk medicine with any one but Dwight and Tuck (for a week), and hunger thereafter.... Believe me, ever til deth, your friend WM. JAMES. T. S. Perry of '66, who lives with me here, reminds me of a story to tell you. He lived with Architect Ware in Paris, and Ware received a visit from Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Dixwell last summer. The concierge woman was terribly impressed by the personal majesty of your uncles, particularly of Dr. Bowditch, of whom she said: "Il a le grand air, tout à fait comme Christophe Colomb!" It would be curious to understand exactly who and what she thought C. C. was, or whether she would have thought Mr. Dixwell like Americus Vespucius if she had known _him_. _To O. W. Holmes, Jr._ BERLIN, _Jan. 3, 1868_. MY DEAR WENDLE,--Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin, tonight. The ghosts of the past all start from their unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless whirligig around me so that, after trying in vain to read three books, to sleep, or to think, I clutch the pen and ink and resolve to work off the fit by a few lines to one of the most obtrusive ghosts of all--namely the tall and lank one of Charles Street. Good golly! how I would prefer to have about twenty-four hours talk with you up in that whitely lit-up room--without the sun rising or the firmament revolving so as to put the gas out, without sleep, food, clothing or shelter except your whiskey bottle, of which, or the like of which, I have not partaken since I have been in these longitudes! I should like to have you opposite me in any mood, whether the facetiously excursive, the metaphysically discursive, the personally confidential, or the jadedly _cursive_ and argumentative--so that the oyster-shells which enclose my being might slowly turn open on their rigid hinges under the radiation, and the critter within loll out his dried-up gills into the circumfused ichor of life, till they grew so fat as not to know themselves again. I feel as if a talk with you of any kind could not fail to set me on my legs again for three weeks at least. I have been chewing on two or three dried-up old cuds of ideas I brought from America with me, till they have disappeared, and the nudity of the Kosmos has got beyond anything I have as yet experienced. I have not succeeded in finding any companion yet, and I feel the want of some outward stimulus to my Soul. There is a man named Grimm here whom my soul loves, but in the way Emerson speaks of, _i.e._ like those people we meet on staircases, etc., and who always ignore our feelings towards them. I don't think we shall ever be able to establish a straight line of communication between us. I don't know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to finish. What with their heaviness and the damnable slowness with which the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so that I can't enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical work of some kind clamors to be done--and I must still wait! There! Having worked off that pent-up gall of six weeks' accumulation I feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you--now that the postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double) there remains no _shadow_ of an excuse for not writing--but, still, I don't expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper into the sloughs of the law--yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from time to time gives her goad another turn in the raw she once established between your ribs. Don't let it heal over yet. When I get home let's establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions--to be composed of none but the very topmost cream of Boston manhood. It will give each one a chance to air his own opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and chuckle when he goes home at what damned fools all the other members are--and may grow into something very important after a sufficient number of years. The German character is without mountains or valleys; its favorite food is roast veal; and in other lines it prefers whatever may be the analogue thereof--all which gives life here a certain flatness to the high-tuned American taste. I don't think any one need care much about coming here unless he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive specialty. I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chapters of physiology. There has a good deal been doing here of late on the physiology of the senses, overlapping perception, and consequently, in a measure, the psychological field. I am wading my way towards it, and if in course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I'll let you know. I'll now pull up. I don't know whether you take it as a compliment that I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps--perhaps you ought to--you, the one emergent peak, to which I cling when all the rest of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what poor possibility of friendship abides in the crazy frame of W. J. meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as ever to the Common Enemy--and don't forget your ally, W. J. That is, after all, all I wanted to write you and it may float the rest of the letter. Pray give my warm regards to your father, mother and sister; and my love to the honest Gray and to Jim Higginson. [_Written on the outside of the envelope._] _Jan. 4._ By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage-stamps which are already on the envelope (Economical W!) I don't reopen it. But I will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you! _Vide_ Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX. _To Thomas W. Ward._ BERLIN, _Jan. --, 1868_. ...It made me feel quite sad to hear you talk about the inward deadness and listlessness into which you had again fallen in New York. Bate not a jot of heart nor hope, but steer right onward. Take for granted that you've got a temperament from which you must make up your mind to expect twenty times as much anguish as other people need to get along with. Regard it as something as external to you as possible, like the curl of your hair. Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos. I am very glad that you think the methodical habits you must stick to in book-keeping are going to be good discipline to you. I confess to having had a little feeling of spite when I heard you had gone back on science; for I had always thought you would one day emerge into deep and clear water there--by keeping on long enough. But I really don't think it so _all_-important what our occupation is, so long as we do respectably and keep a clean bosom. Whatever we are _not_ doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoölogy whenever I was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc., etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are about. I don't mean to say that in some occupations we should not have less of it though. My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically greeted me as the man of calm and clockwork feelings. The reason is that your own vehemence and irregularity was so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter what my private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your mobility, as it were. So I fancy you have always given me credit for less sympathy with you and understanding of your feelings than I really have had. All last winter, for instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment. The appearance of it arose from my reaction against what seemed to me your unduly _noisy_ and demonstrative despair. The fact is, I think, that we have both gone through a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each other in being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particularly logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile temperament; though your physical temperament being so much more tremendous than mine makes a great quantitative difference both in your favor, and against you, as the case may be. Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes a work which shall by its mere _exercise_ interest him and at the same time allow him to feel that through it he takes hold of the reality of things--whatever that may be--in some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can only choose a business in which the evil of feeling restless shall be at a minimum, and then go ahead and make the best of it. That minimum will grow less every year.--In this connection I will again refer to a poem you probably know: "A Grammarian's Funeral," by R. Browning, in "Men and Women." It always strengthens my backbone to read it, and I think the feeling it expresses of throwing upon eternity the responsibility of making good your one-sidedness somehow or other ("Leave _now_ for dogs and apes, Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable. The other requirement is hard theoretically, though practically not so hard as the first. All I can tell you is the thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which, like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world; and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and pain of different kinds. For even at one's lowest ebb of belief, the fact remains empirically certain (and by our will we can, if not _absolutely_ refrain from looking beyond that empirical fact, at least practically and _on the whole_ accept it and let it suffice us)--that men suffer and enjoy. And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of God anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause; and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. Individuals can add to the welfare of the race in a variety of ways. You may delight its senses or "taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it by discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by concocting a new patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of machinery, or by some new application of a natural product. You may open a road, help start some social or business institution, contribute your mite in _any_ way to the mass of the work which each generation subtracts from the task of the next; and you will come into _real_ relations with your brothers--with some of them at least. I know that in a certain point of view, and the most popular one, this seems a cold activity for our affections, a stone instead of bread. We long for sympathy, for a purely _personal_ communication, first with the soul of the world, and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are they who think, or know, that they have got them! But to those who must confess with bitter anguish that they are perfectly isolated from the soul of the world, and that the closest human love encloses a potential germ of estrangement or hatred, that all _personal_ relation is finite, conditional, mixed (_vide_ in Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc., etc.), it may not prove such an unfruitful substitute. At least, when you have added to the property of the race, even if no one knows your name, yet it is certain that, without what you have done, some individuals must needs be acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have modified their life; you are in _real_ relation with them; you have in so far forth entered into their being. And is that such an unworthy stake to set up for our good, after all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even apart from the physical link of generation, have made us what we are. Every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers. _Everything_ we know and are is through men. We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However mean a man may be, man is _the best we know_; and your loathing as you turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life--your homesick yearning for a _Better_, somewhere--is furnished by your manhood; your ideal is made up of traits suggested by past men's words and actions. Your manhood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts like an overarching sky--and all the Good and True and High and Dear that you know by virtue of your sharing in it. They are the Natural Product of our Race. So that it seems to me that a sympathy with men as such, and a desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which, whatever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as good, may very well form an external interest sufficient to keep one's moral pot boiling in a very lively manner to a good old age. The idea, in short, of becoming an accomplice in a sort of "Mankind its own God or Providence" scheme is a _practical_ one. I don't mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come to that, I only say it is _a_ mode of envisaging life; which is capable of affording moral support--and may at any rate help to bridge over the despair of skeptical intervals. I confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset me for a couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept me from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook or crook, long enough, I might make my _nick_, however small a one, in the raw stuff the race has got to shape, and so assert my reality. The stoic feeling of being a sentinel obeying orders without knowing the general's plans is a noble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral culture (Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they may all help to ballast the same man. What a preacher I'm getting to be! I had no idea when I sat down to begin this long letter that I was going to be carried away so far. I feel like a humbug whenever I endeavor to enunciate moral truths, because I am at bottom so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off "_views_" to you, because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by any accidental point of view or formula which you may not exactly have struck on before (_e.g._, what you write me of the effect of that sentence of your mother's about marrying). I had no idea this morning that I had so many of the elements of a Pascal in me. Excuse the presumption.--But to go back. I think that in business as well as in science one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I have been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of my past life--which has been prejudicial to my education, and by telling me which, and by making me understand it some years ago, some one might have conferred a great benefit on me--is an impatience of _results_. Inexperience of life is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an American characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are _sure_ to float up of their own accord, from a long enough daily work at a given matter; and I think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the primary interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the intellectual realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret of German prowess therein. Have confidence, even when you seem to yourself to be making no progress, that, if you but go on in your own uninteresting way, they must bloom out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think I must pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip to thee of our life here.... _To his Father._ TEPLITZ, _Jan. 22, 1868_. MY DEAR DAD,--Don't allow yourself to be shocked with surprise on reading the above date till you hear the reasons which have brought me here at this singular season. They are grounded in the increasing wear and tear of my life in Berlin, and in my growing impatience to get well enough to be able to do some work in the summer.... I find myself getting more interested in physiology and nourishing a hope that I _may_ be able to make its study (and perhaps its teaching) my profession; and, joining the thought that if I came to Teplitz now for three weeks I could have still another turn at it, if necessary, in April,--before the summer semester at Heidelberg began,--to the consciousness that in my present condition I was doing worse than wasting time at Berlin, I took advantage of a fine sunshiny morning four days ago, packed my trunk, said good-bye to T. S. Perry, and took the railroad for this place. I hope you won't think from seeing me back here that my loudly trumpeted improvement in the autumn was fallacious. On the contrary, I feel more than ever, now that I am back in presence of my old measures of strength (distances, etc.), how substantial that improvement was--only it has not yet bridged the way up to complete soundness. I have been feeling for a month past that I ought to come here, but an effeminate shrinking from loneliness and so forth, and the inhuman blackness of the weather kept me from it. Now that I am here, I am only sorry I deferred it so long. I found the _Fürstenbad_ open, and with four other "cure-guests" in it. All its varletry, male and female, fat as wood-chucks from their winter's repose; a theatre (!) going in town three times a week; the head waiter of the restaurant where in the summer I used, for the price of a glass of milk, to read the "Times" and the "Independence Belge," no longer wearing the pallid look of stern and desperate _business_ with which he used to scud around among the crowded tables, and which used to make me stand in mortal fear of him, but appearing as a comfortable and red-cheeked human being with even greater conversational gifts than usual; every one moreover glad to see me, etc., etc. The veil of winter has been lifted for a week and the buried spring [has] peeped out and taken a-breathing before her time. Today everything is a-dripping, the earth has a moving smell, and the sky is full of spots of melting blue. If such weather but lasts, the time will pass here very quickly. I have brought a lot of good books, and if their interest wanes have the whole circulating library to fall back on. So much for Teplitz. Sunday before last Mrs. Bancroft told me that the most beautiful woman in Berlin had asked after me with affection and expressed a desire to see me. After making me guess in vain she told me that it was Mrs. Lieutenant Pertz, _née_ Emma Wilkinson.[43] I went to see her and found her looking hardly a day older or different, and certainly very good-looking, though probably Mrs. B.'s description was exaggerated. She had the sweetest and simplest of manners and asked all about the family, to whom she sends her love. She told me nothing particular about her own family which we did not know, except that Jamie had an aquiline nose. She has three fine children, much more of the British than the German type, and it was right pleasant to see her. She has very handsome brown eyes. Nice manners are a very charming thing, and some of the ladies here might set a good example to some _other_ young ladies I might mention (who do not live 100 miles from Quincy Street); Fräulein Borneman, for example. Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let her face beam with serious beauty, and glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul _with wings_, as it were (but very short ones); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, and you have no idea how lovely she will become.... I am sorry Wilky has had a relapse of his fever. He and Bob are still the working ones of the family (Harry too, though!), but I hope my day will yet come. Give him and Bob a great deal of love for me. Life in Teplitz is favorable to letter-writing and I will write to Bob next week. Love to every one else, from yours ever, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ F�RSTENBAD, TEPLITZ, _Mar. 4, 1868_. ...I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family here named G----, who keep a hotel and restaurant. Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted woman, father with thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two daughters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-taking there reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian's stories that I wanted to get a stenographer and a photographer to take them down. The great, thick remarks, all about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort or other; the jokes; the masses of eatables, from the awful swine soup (tasting of nothing I could think of but the perspiration of the animal and which the terrible mother forced me to gulp down by accusing me, whenever I grew pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through the sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the beer and wine; then the masses of odoriferous cheese, which I refused in spite of all attacks, entreaties and accusations, and then heard, oh, horrors! with somewhat the feeling I suppose with which a criminal hears the judge pass sentence of death upon him,--then heard an order given for some more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of religious earnestness with which the eating of the father was talked about, how the mother told the daughter not to give him so much wine, because he never enjoyed his beer so much after it, while he with his silver spectacles and pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out of the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room with walls of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove at each end of it, etc., etc.,--all brought up the _Taverne du Jambon de Mayence_ into my mind.... [W. J.] * * * * * The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James repaired to Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz lecture and with the hope of following the medical courses during the summer semester. Once more he had to stop work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there he traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically for only the very briefest of glances at the familiar scenes of his school-days, and hurrying on to spend the latter part of the summer at another watering-place, Divonne in Savoy. The following brief letter seems to have been written there, and is interesting as a first reference to Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an important influence on James's thinking. _To his Father._ [DIVONNE?], _Oct. 5, 1868_. DEAR FATHER,--...I have not been doing much studying lately, nor indeed for some time past, though I manage to keep something _dribbling_ all the while. I began the other day Kant's "Kritik," which is written crabbedly enough, but which strikes me so far as almost the sturdiest and _honestest_ piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or wrong (and it is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details of its _Analytik_ part, however the rest may be), there it stands like a great snag or mark to which everything metaphysical or psychological must be _referred_. I wish I had read it earlier. It is very slow reading and I shall only give it a couple of hours daily. I got a little book by a number of authors, "L'Année 1867 Philosophique," which may interest you if you have not got it already. The introduction, a review of the state of philosophy in France for some years back, is by one Charles Renouvier, of whom I never heard before but who, for vigor of style and compression, going to the core of half a dozen things in a single sentence, so different from the namby-pamby diffusiveness of most Frenchmen, is unequaled by anyone. He takes his stand on Kant. I have not read the rest of the book. Here I stop and take my douche. I will be as economical as I can this winter in details, and next summer will see us together. I wish I had the inclination to write, or anything to write about, as Harry has. I feel ashamed of fattening on the common purse when all the other boys are working, but writing seems for me next to impossible. Lots of love to all. Yours, W. J. * * * * * The "cure" at Divonne was as profitless as had been the similar experiments at Teplitz. So instead of staying abroad for the winter, James turned his face homeward almost immediately. After a fortnight's companionship with H. P. Bowditch in Paris, he embarked on November 7 for America, disappointed in the chief hopes with which he had landed in Europe eighteen months before, but much matured in character and thought, and resolved to seek his health and his career at home. [Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.] VI 1869-1872 _Invalidism in Cambridge_ THE return to Cambridge from Germany in November, 1868, marked the beginning of four outwardly uneventful years. James spent them under his father's roof. His family and intimate friends were usually close at hand; the stream of his correspondence shrank to almost nothing. The few letters that have been preserved do incomplete justice to this period, but can, fortunately, be supplemented by other documents. * * * * * James obtained his medical degree easily enough in June, 1869; but he had no thought of engaging in the practice of medicine. He wanted to go on with physiology; but he was not strong enough to work in a laboratory. Condemned to sedentary occupations, and without any definite responsibilities, he seemed, to his own jaundiced vision, to be declining into a desultory and profitless idleness. In this he was hardly fair to himself or to the conditions. It is true that he had no remunerative occupation, and that he could look forward to no well-defined professional career for which he could be preparing and training himself. He was, also, handicapped by the fact that sometimes he could not use his eyes for more than two hours a day. On the other hand, he would probably not have been happy in any professional harness into which he could then have fitted, and was really more fortunate in having leisure to read and discuss and fill note-books forced upon him between his twenty-seventh and thirty-first years. Such leisure has been the unattained goal of many another man with a mind not one tenth so curious and speculative as his; and few men who have attained it have made as good use of their free time as James made of the years 1869 to 1872. His eyes were weak, to be sure, and his letters usually bewail his inability to use them more. But, skipping as he had trained himself to, and snatching at every opportunity, he somehow got over a great deal of reading in neurology, physiology of the nervous system, and psychology. He was not confined to the books that were on the shelves of the Quincy Street house, but could borrow from the excellent Harvard and Boston libraries without inconvenience. At times, when he was able to read for several hours a day, he used, as he put it, "to keep himself from using his mind too much" by turning to non-professional literature in German, French, and English. One letter to his brother (June 1, 1869) affords material for reflection upon the range and power of assimilation of a mind which could seek such relaxation. "I have," he writes in this letter, "been reading for recreation, since you left, a good many German books: Steffens and C. P. Moritz's autobiographies, some lyric poetry, W. Humboldt's letters, Schmidt's history of German literature, etc., which have brought to a head the slowly maturing feeling of German culture.... Reading of the revival, or rather the birth, of German literature--Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, [the] Schlegels, Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a number of others--puts one into a real classical period. These men were all interesting as men, each standing as a type or representative of a certain way of taking life, and beginning at the bottom--taking nothing for granted. In England, the only parallel I can think of is Coleridge, and in France, Rousseau and Diderot. If the heroes and heroines of all of Ste.-Beuve's gossip had had a tenth part of the _significance_ of these and their male and female friends, bad readers like myself would never think of growing impatient with him as an old debauchee." A diary entry made by his sister Alice, a few years later says: "In old days, when [William's] eyes were bad, and I used to begin to tell him something which I thought of interest from whatever book I might be reading ... he would invariably say, 'I glanced into that book yesterday and read that.'"[44] He had already formed the habit of making marginal notes, of writing down summaries of his reading, and of formulating his ideas on paper--the admirable practice, in short, of confiding in note-books and addressing himself freely to the waste-basket. For instance: "In 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how almost everyone who speculated about brain processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his 'Time and Space'), Maudsley, Lockhart, Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality."[45] He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alphabetized blank-books which used to be sold under the name of "Todd's Index Rerum" during the sixties, and which were devised to facilitate indexing and reference. He continued to make entries in these books until 1890, and perhaps later. He also filled copy-books and pocket note-books, of which a few mutilated but interesting fragments remain. In these he sometimes copied out quotations, sometimes noted comments on his reading, sometimes tried to clothe an idea of his own in precise words. Occasionally he made diary-like entries that show how familiar a companion he was making of the note-book. He was already at his ease in the practice of the Baconian maxim that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. A few book-notices or reviews did reach the public. Seven are listed under the years 1868 to 1872 in Professor R. B. Perry's "List of Published Writings." Although the matter of these reviews is seldom of present-day interest, the curious reader will find sentences and paragraphs in them that are prophetic of passages in James's later writings, and will observe that he already commanded a style that expressed the color and quality of his thought.[46] * * * * * Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and 1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others. The problem of the moral constitution of things, the question of man's relation to the Universe,--whether significant or impotent and meaningless,--these had clearly come home to him as more than questions of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit that the passage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fictitious French correspondent, who was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given. They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious Experience." "Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight, to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. "In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.... I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that, if I had not clung to scripture-texts like _The eternal God is my refuge_, etc., _Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden_, etc., _I am the Resurrection and the Life_, etc., I think I should have grown really insane." The date of this experience cannot and need not be fixed exactly. It was undoubtedly later than the Berlin winter and after the return to Cambridge. Perhaps it was during the winter of 1869-70, for one of the note-books contains an entry dated April 30, 1870, in which James's resolution and self-confidence appear to be reasserting themselves. This entry must be quoted too. It is not only illuminating with respect to 1870, but suggests parts of the "Psychology" and of the philosophic essays that later gave comfort and courage to unnumbered readers. "I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will--"the sustaining of a thought _because I choose to_ when I might have other thoughts"--need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present--until next year--that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative _Grüblei_[48] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the _form_ of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action--and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. _Principiis obsta_--Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in _Anschauungen_,[49] but in accumulated _acts_ of thought lies salvation. _Passer outre._ Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, _can't_ be optimistic--but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing _resistance_ of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in][50] doing and suffering and creating." * * * * * The next letter was written from Cambridge during the winter following the return from Germany, and while James was completing the work necessary to entitle him to a medical degree.[51] The reader will recognize "the firm of B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to Bowditch in the letter of December 12, 1867. _To Henry P. Bowditch._ CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 24, 1869_. MY DEAR HENRY,--I am in receipt of two letters from yez (dates forgotten) wherein you speak of having received my money and paid my bills and of Fleury's book. You're a gentleman in all respects. You said nothing about whether the pounds when reduced back to francs and Thalers made exactly the original sum from which the pounds were calculated. If it was but five centimes under and you have concealed it, I shall brand you as a villain where'er I go. So out with the truth. Do I still owe you anything?... I have just been quit by Chas. S. Peirce, with whom I have been talking about a couple of articles in the St. Louis "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" by him, which I have just read. They are exceedingly bold, subtle and incomprehensible, and I can't say that his vocal elucidations helped me a great deal to their understanding, but they nevertheless interest me strangely. The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the observatory for good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of professorships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe," orthodox men. He has had good reason, I know, to feel a little discouraged about the prospect, but I think he ought to hang on, as a German would do, till he grows gray.... I saw Wyman a few weeks ago. He said his Indian collecting, etc., took up all his working time now. Do you keep your room above the freezing point or can't the thing be done? Have you made any bosom friends among French students, or do you find the superficial accidents of language and breeding to hold you wider apart than the deep force of your common humanity can draw you together? It's deuced discouraging to find how this is almost certain to be the case. The older I grow, the more important does it seem to me for the interest of science and of the sick, and of the firm of B. & J., that you should take charge of a big state lunatic asylum. Think of the interesting cases, and of the autopsies! And if you once took firm root, say at Somerville, I should feel assured of a refuge in my old and destitute days, for you certainly would not be treacherous enough to spurn me from the door when I presented myself--on the pretext that I was only shamming dementia. Think of the matter seriously. I read a little while ago Chambers's "Clinical Lectures," which are exceedingly interesting and able. The lectures on indigestion in the volume are worth, in quality, ten such books as that Guipon I left in Paris, though more limited in subject. I have been trying to get "Hilton on Rest and Pain," which you recommended, from the Athenæum, but, _more librorum_, when you want 'em, it keeps "out." ... I hope this letter is _décousue_ enough for you. What is a man to write when a reef is being taken in his existence, and absence from thought and life is all he aspires to. Better times will come, though, and with them better letters. Good-bye! Ever yours, WM. JAMES. _To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr._ [_Winter of 1868-69._] Gents!--entry-thieves--chevaliers d'industrie--well-dressed swindlers--confidence men--wolves in sheep's clothing--asses in lion's skin--gentlemanly pickpockets--beware! The hand of the law is already on your throats and waits but a wink to be tightened. All the resources of the immensely powerful Corporation of Harvard University have been set in motion, and concealment of your miserable selves or of the almost equally miserable (though not _as such_ miserable) goloshes which you stole from our entry on Sunday night is as impossible as would be the concealment of the State House. The motive of your precipitate departure from the house became immediately evident to the remaining guests. But they resolved to _ignore_ the matter provided the overshoes were replaced within a week; if not, no _considerations whatever_ will prevent Messrs. Gurney & Perry[52] from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel adventurers should be made an example of, and your offence just comes in time to make the cup of public and private forbearance overflow. My father and self have pledged our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to see the thing through with Gurney and Perry, as the credit of our house is involved and we might ourselves have been losers, not only from you but from the aforesaid G. & P., who have been heard to go about openly declaring that "if they had known the party was going to be _that_ kind of an affair, d--d if they would not have started off earlier themselves with some of those aristocratic James overcoats, hats, gloves and canes!" So let me as a friend advise you to send the swag back. No questions will be asked--Mum's the word. WM. JAMES. _To Thomas W. Ward._ _March_ [?], 1869. ...I had great movings of my bowels toward thee lately--the distant, cynical isolation in which we live with our heart's best brothers sometimes comes over me with a deep bitterness, and I had a little while ago an experience of life which woke up the spiritual monad within me as has not happened more than once or twice before in my life. "Malgré la vue des misères où nous vivons et qui nous tiennent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the existence, at least, of something real--of reason at the bottom of things. I can't tell you how it was now. I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy.[53] I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are _en rapport_ with reason.--How to conceive it? Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything.--It is not that we are all nature _but_ some point which is reason, but that all is nature _and_ all is reason too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see!... [W. J.] * * * * * "The Bootts," with whom "architect Ware" reported the Reverend Mr. Foote to be hand in glove in Italy in 1867, reappear in the following letter. Francis Boott (Harvard 1832) had early been left a widower, and had just returned from a long European residence which he had devoted to the education of his charming and gifted daughter "Lizzie," later to become the wife of Frank Duveneck of Cincinnati, the painter and sculptor. Boott was about the age of Henry James, Senior, but the intimacy which began at Pomfret during the summer of 1869 ripened into one of those whole-family friendships which obliterate differences of age. Later, although both the elder Jameses and young Mrs. Duveneck had died, William and Boott saw each other frequently in Cambridge. The beautiful little commemorative address which James delivered after Boott's death has been included in the volume of "Memories and Studies." _To Henry P. Bowditch._ POMFRET, CONN., _Aug. 12, 1869_. ...I have been at this place since July 1st with my family. There are a few farmhouses close together on the same road, which take boarders. We are in the best of them, and very pleasant it is. The country is beautifully hilly and fertile, and the climate deliciously windy and cool. I came here resolved to lead the life of an absolute caterpillar, and have succeeded very well so far, spending most of my time swinging in a hammock under the pine trees in front of the house, and having hardly read fifty pages of anything in the whole six weeks. It has told on me most advantageously. I am far better every way than when I came, and am beginning to walk about quite actively. Maybe it's the beginning of a final rise to health, but I'm so sick of prophesying that I won't say anything about it till it gets more confirmed. One thing is sure, however, that I've given the policy of "rest" a fair trial and shall consider myself justified next winter in going about visiting and to concerts, etc., regardless of the fatigue. I am forgetting all this while to tell you that I passed my examination with no difficulty and am entitled to write myself M.D., if I choose. Buckingham's midwifery gave me some embarrassment, but the rest was trifling enough. So there is one epoch of my life closed, and a pretty important one, I feel it, both in its scientific "yield" and in its general educational value as enabling me to see a little the inside workings of an important profession and to learn from it, as an average example, how all the work of human society is performed. I feel a good deal of intellectual hunger nowadays, and if my health would allow, I think there is little doubt that I should make a creditable use of my freedom, in pretty hard study. I hope, even as it is, not to have to remain absolutely idle--and shall try to make whatever reading I can do bear on psychological subjects.... Wendell Holmes and John Gray were on here last Saturday and Sunday, and seemed in very jolly spirits at being turned out to pasture from their Boston pen. I should think Wendell worked too hard. Gray is going to Lenox for a fortnight, but W. is to take no vacation. During the month of July we had the good fortune to have as fellow boarders Mr. Boott and his daughter from Boston. Miss B., although not overpoweringly beautiful, is one of the very best members of her sex I ever met. She spent the first eighteen years of her life in Europe, and has of course Italian, French and German at her fingers' ends, and I never realized before how much a good education (I mean in its common sense of a wide information) added to the charms of a woman. She has a great talent for drawing, and was very busy painting here, which, as she is in just about the same helpless state in which I was when I abandoned the art, made her particularly interesting to me. You had better come home soon and make her acquaintance--for you know these first-class young spinsters do not _always_ keep for ever, although on the whole they tend to, in Boston. The successors to the Bootts in this house are Gen. Casey (of "Infantry Tactics" notoriety) and spouse. He is an amiable but mildish old gentleman, and about thirty years older than his wife. I'm glad, on the whole, that General Grant, and not he, was our commander in the late war. If you want some good light German reading, let me advise you to try at least the first half of Jung-Stilling's autobiography. He was a pious German who lived through the latter half of the last century, and wrote with the utmost vividness and naïveté all his experiences, that the glory of God's Providence might be increased. I read it with great delight a few weeks since; it merits the adjective _fresh_ as well as most books. I saw Jeffries Wyman a short time before leaving. He said he had heard from you. I'd give much to hear from your lips an account of your plans, hopes and so forth, as well as the _Ergebnisse_ of the past year. I was truly glad to hear of your determination to stick to physiology. However discouraging the work of each day may seem, stick at it long enough, and you'll wake up some morning--a physiologist--just as the man who takes a daily drink finds himself unexpectedly a drunkard. I wish I'd asked you sooner to send me a photograph of Bernard and Vulpian--or any other Parisian medical men worth having--is it too late now?--and too late for Pflüger? I address this still to Bonn, supposing they'll send it after you if you've gone. Write soon to yours affectionately, WM. JAMES. _To Miss Mary Tappan._ _Sunday, April 26_ [1870?]. MY DEAR MARY,--Mother says she met you in town this morning, looking more lovely than ever, but--_with your bonnet on the back of your head!_ I hope that this is a mistake. Mother's eyesight is growing fallacious and frequently leads her to see what she would like to see. I cannot think that you would submit to be swayed in your own views of right bonnet-wearing by the mere vociferation of persons like her and Alice, especially when you had heard _me_ expressly say I agreed with you that the forehead is the truly ladylike place for a bonnet. Enough!---- I waded out to Cambridge from your party. If you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did (but I'm afraid you didn't) you will keep on giving them. Somehow your part of the town is very inaccessible to me or I should frequently bore you. Hoping, in spite of this fearful mother story today, that you are still unsophisticated, I am always yours affectionately, WM. JAMES. You need not answer this. [_Across top of first page_] Written two days ago--kept back from diffidence--sent now because anything is better than this dead silence between us! _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 7, 1870_. DEAR HARRY,--'Tis Saturday evening, ten minutes past six of the clock and a cold and rainy day (Indian winter, as T. S. P. calls such). I had a fire lighted in my grate this afternoon. There is nevertheless a broken blue spot in the eastern clouds as I look out, and the grass and buds have started visibly since the morning. The trees are half-way out--you of course have long had them in full leaf--and the early green is like a bath to the eyes. Father is gone to Newport for a day, and is expected back within the hour. My jaw is aching badly in consequence of a tooth I had out two days ago, the which refused to be pulled, was broken, but finally extracted, and has left its neighbors prone to ache since. I hope it won't last much longer. I spent the morning, part of it at least, in fishing the "Revues Germaniques" up from [the] cellar, looking over their contents, and placing them volumewise, and flat, in the two top shelves of the big library bookcase _vice_ Thies's good old books just removed, the shelves being too low to take any of our books upright. I feel melancholy as a whip-poor-will and took up pen and paper to sigh melodiously to you. But sighs are hard to express in words. We have been three weeks now without hearing from you, and if a letter does not come tomorrow or Monday, I don't know what'll become of us. Howells brought, a week ago, a long letter you had written to him on the eve of leaving Malvern, so our next will be from London.... My! how I long to see you, and feel of you, and talk things over. I have at last, I think, begun to rise out of the sloughs of the past three months.... What a blessing this change of seasons is, as you used to say, especially in the spring. The winter is man's enemy, he must exert himself against it to live, or it will squeeze him in one night out of existence. So it is hateful to a sick man, and all the greater is the peace of the latter when it yields to a time when nature seems to coöperate with life and float one passively on. But I hear Father arriving and I must go down to hear his usual _compte rendu_.[54] * * * * * _Sunday_, 3 P.M. No letter from you this morning.... It seems to me that all a man has to depend on in this world, is, in the last resort, mere brute power of resistance. I can't bring myself, as so many men seem able to, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over. It's as real as the good, and if it is denied, good must be denied too. It must be accepted and hated, and resisted while there's breath in our bodies.... _To Henry P. Bowditch._ CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 29, 1870_. MY DEAR HENRY,--Your letter written from Leipzig just before the declaration of war reached me in the country. I have thought of you and of answering you, abundantly, ever since; but have mostly been prevented by sheer physical _imbecillitas_. Now I am ashamed of such a state, and shall write you a page or so a day till the letter is finished. I have had no idea all this time where or what you have been, traveler, student, or medical army officer. You may imagine how excited I was at the beginning of the war. I had not dared to hope for such a complete triumph of poetic justice as occurred. Now I feel much less interested in the success of the Germans, first because I think it's time that the principle of territorial conquest were abolished, second because success will redound to the credit of autocratic government there, and good as that may happen to be in the particular junctures, it's unsafe and pernicious in the long run. Moreover, if France succeeds in beating off the Germans now, I should think there would be some chance of the peace being kept between them hereafter--the French will have gained an insight they never had of the horrors of a war of conquest, and some degree of loathing for it in the abstract; and they will not have to fight to regain their honor. Moreover, I should like to see the republic succeed. But if Alsace and Lorraine be taken, there _must_ be another war, for them and for honor. On the other hand, justice seems to demand a permanent penalty for the political immorality of France. So that there will be enough good to console one for the bad, whichever way it turns out.... * * * * * 31st. As I said, I have no idea of how the war may have affected your movements and occupations. It did my heart good to hear of the solid and businesslike way in which you were working at Leipzig, and I should think [that], with Ludwig and the laboratory, you would feel like giving it another winter--though the other attractions of Berlin and Vienna must pull you rather strongly away. I heard a rumor the other day that Lombard's place was being kept for you here. I hope it's true, for your sake and that of Boston. Thank you very much for the photographs of Ludwig and Fechner. I have enjoyed Ludwig's face very much, he must be a good fellow; and Fechner, down to below the orbits, has a strange resemblance to Jeffries Wyman. I have quite a decent nucleus of a physiognomical collection now, and any further contributions it may please you to make to it will be most thankfully received. J. Wyman I have not seen since his return. Such is the state of brutal social isolation which characterizes this community! Partly sickness, partly a morbid shrinking from the society of anyone who is alive intellectually are to blame, however, in my case. I, as I wrote, am long since dead and buried in that respect. I fill my belly for about four hours daily with husks,--newspapers, novels and biographies, but thought is tabooed,--and you can imagine that conversation with Wyman should only intensify the sense of my degradation. * * * * * _Jan. 23, 1871._ Since my last date I have been unable to write until today, and now, I think, to make sure of the letter going at all, I had better cut it short and send it off to your father to direct. I have indeed nothing particular to communicate, and only want to give you assurance of my undying affection. This morning 4 degrees below zero, and N.W. wind. Don't you wish you were here to enjoy the sunshine of it? A batch of telegrams in the "Advertiser," showing that France must soon throw up the sponge. Faidherbe licked at St. Quentin, Bourbaki pursued, Chanzy almost disintegrated, and Paris frozen and starved out. Well, so be it! only the German liberals will have the harder battle to fight at home for the next twenty years. I suspect that England, irresolute and unhandsome as is the figure she makes externally, is today in a healthier state than any country in Europe. She is renovating herself socially, and although she may be eclipsed during these days of "militarismus," yet when they depart, as surely they must some time, from sheer exhaustion, she will be ready to take the lead by influence. I know of no news here to tell you. I suppose you get the "Nation," which keeps up well, notwithstanding its monotony. I shall be expecting to fold you to my bosom some time next summer. Heaven speed the day! Write me as soon as you get this. You haven't the same excuse for silence that I have. Speak of your work, your plans and the war. Good bye, old fellow, and believe me, ever your friend, WM. JAMES. _To Henry P. Bowditch._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 8, 1871_. ...So the gallant Gauls are shooting each other again! I wish we knew what it all meant. From the apparent generality of the movement in Paris, it seems as if it must be something more dignified than it at first appeared. But can anything great be expected now from a nation between the two factions of which there is such hopeless enmity and mistrust as between the religious and the revolutionary parties in France? No mediation is possible between them. In England, America and Germany, a regular advance is possible, because each man confides in his brothers. However great the superficial differences of opinion, there is at bottom a trust in the power of the deep forces of human nature to work out their salvation, and the minority is contented to bide its time. But in France, nothing of the sort; no one feels secure against what he considers evil, by any guaranty but force; and if his opponents get uppermost, he thinks all is forever lost. How much Catholic education is to answer for this and how much national idiosyncrasy, it is hard to say. But I am inclined to think the latter is a large factor. The want of true sympathy in the French character, their love of external mechanical order, their satisfaction in police-regulation, their everlasting cry of "traitor," all point to it. But, on the other hand, protestantism would seem to have a good deal to do with the fundamental cohesiveness of society in the countries of Germanic blood. For what may be called the revolutionary party there has _developed_ through insensible grades of rationalism out of the old orthodox conceptions, religious and social. The process has been a continuous modification of positive belief, and the extremes, even if they had no respect for each other and no desire for mutual accommodation (which I think at bottom they have), would yet be kept from cutting each other's throats by the intermediate links. But in France Belief and Denial are separated by a chasm. The step once made, "écrasez l'infâme" is the only watchword on each side. How any order is possible except by a Cæsar to hold the balance, it is hard to see. But I don't want to dose you with my crude speculations. This difference was brought home vividly to me by reading yesterday in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" for last December a splendid little story, "Histoire d'un Sous-Maître," by Erckmann-Chatrian, and what was uppermost in my mind came out easiest in writing. I shall be overjoyed to see you in September, but expect to hear from you many a time ere then. I see little medical society, none in fact; but hope to begin again soon. [R. H.] Fitz, I believe, is showing great powers in "Pathology" since his return. And I hear a place in the school is being kept warm for you on your return. Count me for an auditor. I invested yesterday in a ticket for a course of "University" lectures on "Optical Phenomena and the Eye," by B. Joy Jeffries, to be begun out here tomorrow. It's the first mingling in the business of life which I have done since my return home. Wyman is in Florida till May. He has an obstinate cough and seems anxious about his lungs. I hope he'll be spared, though, many a long year. Ever yours truly, WM. JAMES. _To Charles Renouvier._ CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 2, 1872_. MONSIEUR,--Je viens d'apprendre par votre "Science de la Morale," que l'ouvrage de M. Lequier, auquel vous faites renvoi dans votre deuxième Essai de Critique, n'a jamais été mis en vente. Ceci explique l'insuccès avec lequel j'ai pendant longtemps tâché de me le procurer par la voie de la librairie. Serait-ce trop vous demander, s'il vous restait encore des exemplaires, de m'en envoyer un, que je présenterais, après l'avoir lu, en votre nom, à la bibliothèque Universitaire de cette ville? Si l'édition est déjà épuisée, ne vous mettez pas en peine de me répondre, et que le vif intérêt que je prends à vos idées serve d'excuse à ma demande. Je ne peux pas laisser échapper cette occasion de vous dire toute l'admiration et la reconnaissance que m'ont inspirée la lecture de vos Essais (sauf le 3me, que je n'ai pas encore lu). Grâce à vous, je possède pour la première fois une conception intelligible et raisonnable de la Liberté. Je m'y suis rangé à peu près. Sur d'autres points de votre philosophie il me reste encore des doutes, mais je puis dire que par elle je commence à renaître à la vie morale; et croyez, monsieur, que ce n'est pas une petite chose! Chez nous, c'est la philosophie de Mill, Bain, et Spencer qui emporte tout à présent devant lui. Elle fait d'excellents travaux en psychologie, mais au point de vue pratique elle est déterministe et matérialiste, et déjà je crois aperçevoir en Angleterre les symptomes d'une renaissance de la pensée religieuse. Votre philosophie par son côté phénoméniste semble très propre à frapper les ésprits élevés dans l'école empirique anglaise, et je ne doute pas dès qu'elle sera un peu mieux connue en Angleterre et dans ce pays, qu'elle n'ait un assez grand retentissement. Elle paraît faire son chemin lentement; mais je suis convaincu que chaque année nous rapprochera du jour où elle sera reconnue de tous comme étant la plus forte tentative philosophique que le siècle ait vue naître en France, et qu'elle comptera toujours comme un des grands jalons dans l'histoire de la speculation. Dès que ma santé (depuis quelques années très mauvaise) me permet un travail intellectuel un peu sérieux, je me propose d'en faire une étude plus approfondie et plus critique, et d'en donner un compte-rendu dans une de nos revues. Si donc, monsieur, il se trouve un exemplaire encore disponible de la "Rech[erche] d'une première Verité," j'oserai vous prier de l'envoyer à l'adresse de la libraire ci-incluse, en écrivant mon nom sur la couverture. M. Galette soldera tous les frais, s'il s'en trouve. Veuillez encore une fois, cher monsieur, croire aux sentiments d'admiration et de haut respect avec lesquels je suis votre très obéissant serviteur, WILLIAM JAMES. VII 1872-1878 _First Years of Teaching_ IN 1872 President Eliot wished to provide instruction in physiology and hygiene for the Harvard undergraduates, and looked about him for instructors. He had formed an impression of James ten years before which, as he said, "was later to become useful to Harvard University," and in the interval he had known him as a Cambridge neighbor and had been aware of the direction his interests had taken. He proposed that James and Dr. Thomas Dwight--a young anatomist who was also to become an eminent teacher--should share in the new undertaking. In August, 1872, the College appointed James "Instructor in Physiology," to conduct three exercises a week "during half of the ensuing academic year." Thus began a service in the University which was to be almost continuously active and engrossing until 1907. The fact that James began by teaching anatomy and physiology, passed thence to psychology, and last to philosophy, has been wrongly cited as if his interest in each successive subject of his college work had been the fruit of his experience in teaching the preceding subject. This inference from the mere sequence of events will appear strange to attentive readers of what has gone before. Indeed, if the fact that James devoted a good share of his time to physiology in the seventies calls for remark at all, it should be noted that his subject, from soon after the beginning, was really physiological psychology, and that--more interesting than anything else in this connection--one may discern a patient surrender to limitations imposed by the state of his health on the one hand, and on the other a sound sense of the value of physiology to psychological investigations and so to philosophy, as both underlying the sequence of events in his teaching. Whatever may have been the succession of his college "courses," psychology and philosophy were never divorced from each other in his thought or in his writings. Thus it is interesting to find, that at the very moment of his engagement to teach physiology,--at a date intermediate between the appointment and the commencement of the course in fact,--he wrote to his brother, "If I were well enough, now would be my chance to strike at Harvard College, for Peterson has just resigned his sub-professorship of philosophy, and I know of no very formidable opponent. But it's impossible. I keep up a small daily pegging at my physiology, whose duties don't begin till January, and which I shall find easy, I think." He had needed definite duties and responsibilities and more or less recognized his need; so he undertook to teach a subject which, though congenial and interesting, lay distinctly off the path of his deepest inclination. The first three fragments that follow refer to his preparation for the plunge into teaching. The course on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology was given by Dwight and James under the general head of Natural History and was an "elective" open to Juniors and Seniors. "As the course was experimental and a part of the new expansion of the Elective System," writes President Eliot, "the President and the Faculty were interested in the fact that the new course under these two young instructors attracted 28 Juniors and 25 Seniors." _To Henry James._ SCARBORO, _Aug. 24, 1872_. ...The appointment to teach physiology is a perfect God-send to me just now, an external motive to work, which yet does not strain me--a dealing with men instead of my own mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late and which it will certainly do me good to drop for a year.... * * * * * CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 24, 1872_. ...I go into the Medical School nearly every morning to hear Bowditch lecture, or paddle round in his laboratory. It is a noble thing for one's spirits to have some responsible work to do. I enjoy my revived physiological reading greatly, and have in a corporeal sense been better for the past four or five weeks than I have been at all since you left.... * * * * * CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 13, 1873_. ...This morning arose, went to Brewer's to get two partridges to garnish our cod-fish dinner. Bought at Richardson's an "Appleton's Journal" containing part of "Bressant," a novel by Julian Hawthorne, to send Bob Temple. At 10.30 arrived your letter of January 26th, which was a very pleasant continuation of your _Aufenthalt_ in Rome. At 12.30, after reading an hour in Flint's "Physiology," I went to town, paid a bill of Randidge's, looked into the Athenæum reading-room, got one dozen raw oysters at Higgins's saloon in Court Street, came out again, thermometer having risen to near thawing point, dozed half an hour before the fire, and am now writing this to you. I am enjoying a two weeks' respite from tuition, the boys being condemned to pass examinations, in which I luckily take no part at present. I find the work very interesting and stimulating. It presents two problems, the intellectual one--how best to state your matter to them; and the practical one--how to govern them, stir them up, not bore them, yet make them work, etc. I should think it not unpleasant as a permanent thing. The authority is at first rather flattering to one. So far, I seem to have succeeded in interesting them, for they are admirably attentive, and I hear expressions of satisfaction on their part. Whether it will go on next year can't at this hour, for many reasons, be decided. I have done almost absolutely no visiting this winter, and seen hardly anyone or heard anything till last week, when a sort of frenzy took possession of me and I went to a symphony concert and thrice to the theatre. A most lovely English actress, young, innocent, refined, has been playing Juliet, which play I enjoyed most intensely, though it was at the Boston Theatre and her support almost as poor as it could have been. Neilson is she hight. I ne'er heard of her before. A rival American beauty has been playing a stinking thing of Sardou's ("Agnes") at the Globe, which disgusted me with cleverness. Her name is Miss Ethel, and she is a ladylike but depressing phenomenon, all made up of nerves and American insubstantiality. I have read hardly anything of late, some of the immortal Wordsworth's "Excursion" having been the best. I have simply shaken hands with Gray since his engagement, and have only seen Holmes twice this winter. I fear he is at last feeling the effects of his overwork.... * * * * * CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 6, 1873_. ...I have been cut out all this winter from the men with whom I used to gossip on generalities, Holmes, Putnam, Peirce, Shaler, John Gray and, last not least, yourself. I rather hanker after it, Bowditch being almost the only man I have seen anything of this winter, and that at his laboratory.... Child and I have struck up quite an intimacy.... T. S. Perry is my only surviving crony. He dines pretty regular once a week here.... Ever your affectionate W. J. * * * * * The next letter, although not from William James, will help to fill out the picture. _Henry James, Senior, to Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 18, 1873_. ... [William] gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he will have next year a still larger number by his fame. He came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and after walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriacal"--he used that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the difference between death and life." He had a great effusion. I was afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but more than anything else, his having given up the notion that all mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of the fact of the change, I never had been more delighted than by hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I have known him before.... * * * * * James's first Harvard appointment had been for one year only. In the spring of 1873 the question of its renewal on somewhat different terms came up. President Eliot informed him that the College wished some one man to give the instruction which he and Dr. Dwight had shared between them, and offered him the whole course, including the anatomy. It cost him "some perplexity to make the decision." He thought he saw that such an instructorship "might easily grow into a permanent biological appointment, to succeed Wyman, perhaps." At first he resolved "to fight it out on the line of mental science," feeling that "with such arrears of lost time behind [him] and such curtailed power of work," he could no longer "afford to make so considerable an expedition into the field of anatomy." But when he then considered himself as a possible future teacher of philosophy, he was overwhelmed by a feeling which he recorded on a page of his diary: "Philosophical activity _as a business_ is not normal for most men, and not for me.... To make the _form_ of all possible thought the prevailing _matter_ of one's thought breeds hypochondria. Of course my deepest interest will, as ever, lie with the most general problems. But ... my strongest moral and intellectual craving is for some stable reality to lean upon.... That gets reality for us in which we place our responsibility, and the concrete facts in which a biologist's responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant mood is on him; and a basis too upon which he can passively float and tide over times of weakness and depression, trusting all the while blindly in the beneficence of nature's forces, and the return of higher opportunities." Accordingly he determined to give himself to biology, reporting to his brother Henry, who was at that time in Europe, "I am not a strong enough man to choose the other and nobler lot in life, but I can in a less penetrating way work out a philosophy in the midst of the other duties...." * * * * * As the summer went on, he still had misgivings that he would not be strong enough to prepare and conduct the laboratory demonstrations necessary for a large class in comparative anatomy and physiology. He saw that his first year of teaching had been "of great moral service to him," but thought that in other ways the strain and fatigue had been a brake upon the rate of his wished-for improvement. He therefore made up his mind to postpone the instructorship for a year and go abroad once more. These hesitations, and a few months in Europe, marked the end of the period of morbid depression through which the reader has been following him. He returned to America eager for work. Meanwhile parts of four letters written while he was abroad may be given. _To his Family._ ON BOARD S.S. SPAIN, _Oct. 17, 1873_. DEAREST FAMILY,--I begin my Queenstown letter now because the first section of the voyage seems to be closing. The delicious warm stern wind, cloudy sky and smooth sea which we have had, unlike anything I remember on the Atlantic, threatens to change into something less agreeable, for the wind is fresh ahead, and the waves all capped with white and the vessel begins to roll more and more. Hitherto she has not rolled an inch, and all our days have been spent on deck, and I have enjoyed less sickness than ever before; though I must say I loathe the element. I am confirmed in my preference for big boats, and shall probably try one of the Inman line when I return, as this, sweet Alice, is rather Cunardy as to its table and sitting accommodations. Miss K---- and her two friends sit opposite me at meals and seem to ply a good knife and fork. The other passengers are inoffensive and quiet, with the exception of my roommate, who is a fine fellow, and a lovely young missionary going to the Gabun coast to convert the niggers--a fearful waste of herself, one is tempted to think. There are eleven missionaries on board, and a young lady who is traveling with a party of them and confided to me yesterday that she dreaded it was her doom to become one too. My chum is a graduate of Bowdoin College, going to study two years in Europe on money which he made during his vacations by peddling quack medicines of his own concoction, and cutting corns. He has supported himself four years in this way, and _abgesehen_ from the swindle of his life in vacation time, is an honor to his native land, without prejudices and full of animal spirits, wit and intelligence. We wash in the same basin. He has never tasted spirituous liquor. I am also intimate with a French commercial traveler, incredibly ignorant, but extremely good-natured and gentlemanly. I have now determined to stick to the missionary as close as possible. She is twenty-four years old and very beautiful. I finished the "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" yesterday. A perfectly beautiful book, beside which "Good-bye, Sweetheart," which I have begun, tastes coarse. Good-bye. I hope a storm won't arise, but if it does, I'm glad enough to be in such an extraordinarily steady ship. I pity you at home without me, and long to pat the rich, creamy throat of little sister. (Expression derived from "Goodbye, Sweetheart.") * * * * * _Friday Morn._ Ach! I thought yesterday was Friday, but found in the evening that it was only Thursday. No matter, six days are now past. As I predicted, the sea grew pretty big before sundown and the ship has been skipping about all night like a lively kitten. But her motion is delightfully easy, and no one, so far as I can see, has been sick. I never was better in my life than yesterday made me. Nevertheless, little Sister, in looking at the black waves with their skin of silver lace I have regretted saying that safety was a minor consideration with me. I doubt in my heart that even comfort is to be preferred to danger. The sea looks too indigestible--the all-digesting sea! I threw away "Goodbye, Sweetheart" at the 40th page and have begun the "Tour of the World in Eighty Days," a much better book. I am sorry that the little beauty's care for her Bro.'s comfort did not go so far as to provide him with a needle-and-thread-book, etc. _True_ sympathy divines wants; and a sister who could not foresee that in three days her bro. should be driven to borrowing Miss K----'s needle-book to sew on his buttons cannot be said to be in very close magnetic relations with him. I lurched about the deck arm in arm with the young missionary yestreen. I told her that, if I were a missionary, instead of going to the most unhealthy part of Africa, I would choose, say, Paris for a field. She, all unconscious of the subtle humor of my remark, said, "Oh, yes! there are fearful numbers of heathen there!" I have just rolled out of bed and into my clothes, and write this in my stateroom, but can stand no longer its aromatic air and hasten to say good-bye and mount to the deck.... Good-bye, good-bye. Ever your loving W. J. * * * * * On landing, James proceeded to Florence, to join his brother Henry for a winter in Italy. _To his Sister._ FLORENCE, _Oct. 29_ [1873]. 12 midnight. BELOVED SWEETLINGTON,--At this solemn hour I can't go to sleep without remembering thee and thy beauty. I have just arrived from an eleven-hours ride from Turin, pouring rain all the way. Ditto yesterday during my twenty-two-hours ride from Paris. The Angel sleeps in number 39 hard by, all unwitting that I, the Demon (or perhaps you have already begun in your talks to distinguish me from him as the Archangel), am here at last. I wouldn't for worlds disturb this his last independent slumber. Not having seen the sun but for three days (on board ship) since the eleventh, the natural gloom of my disposition and circumstances has been much aggravated. And I had in London and Paris a pretty melancholy time. I stayed but two days and one night in the latter place, which, according to the law of opposition that rules your opinions and mine, seemed to me a very tedious place. Its Haussmanization has produced a terribly monotonous-looking city--no expression of having _grown_, in any of the quarters I visited, and I did not have time to bring to the surface what power I may possess of sympathizing with the French way of being and doing. The awful thin and slow dinner in the tremendously imperial dining-room of the Hôtel du Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglementation of everything visible, contrasted with the volcanic situation of things at the present moment, all a-kinder turned my plain Yankee stomach, which has not yet recovered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Théâtre Français and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splendidly represented. Altogether I don't care if I never go to Paris again. London "impressed" me twelve times as much. Today in Italy my spirits have riz. The draggle-tailed physiognomy of the railway stations on the way here, the beautifully good-natured easy-going expression on the faces of the railway officials, the charming dialogue I have just had with the aged but angelic chambermaid whose phrases I managed to understand the sense of as a whole without recognizing any particular words--together with the consciousness of having for a time come to my journey's end and of the certainty of breakfasting tomorrow with the Angel, all let me go to bed with a light heart; hoping that yours is as much so, beloved Alice and all.... _To his Sister._ FLORENCE, _Nov. 23, 1873_. BELOVED SISTERKIN,--Your "nice long letter," as you call it, of Oct. 26 reached me five days ago, Mother's of November 4th yesterday, and with it one from Father to Harry. Though you will probably disbelieve me, I cannot help stating how agreeable it is to me to be once more in regular communication with that which, in spite of all shortcomings, is all that has ever been vouchsafed to me in the way of a "home" (and a mother). The hotel in which we live here is anything but home-like. In fact, when the heart aches for cosiness, etc., all it can do is to turn out into the street. I begin to feel, too, strongly that at my time of life, with such a set of desultory years behind, what a man most wants is to be settled and concentrated, to cultivate a patch of ground which may be humble but still is his own. Here all this dead civilization crowding in upon one's consciousness forces the mind open again even as the knife the unwilling oyster--and what my mind wants most now is practical tasks, not the theoretical digestion of additional masses of what to me are raw and disconnected empirical materials. I feel like one still obliged to eat more and more grapes and pears and pineapples, when the state of the system imperiously demands a fat Irish stew, or something of that sort. I knew it all before I came, however; and I hope in a fortnight to be able comparatively to disregard what lies about me and get interested in the physiological books I brought. So far I find the pictures, etc., drive my thoughts far away. I have just been reading a big German octavo, Burkhardt's "Renaissance in Italy," with the title of which you may enrich your historical consciousness, though I hardly think you need read the book. This is the place for history. I don't see how, if one lived here, historical problems could help being the most urgent ones for the mind. It would suit you admirably. Even art comes before one here much more as a problem--how to account for its development and decline--than as a refreshment and an edification. I really think that end is better served by the stray photographs which enter our houses at home, finding us in the midst of our work and surprising us. But here I am pouring out this one-sided splenetic humor upon you without having the least intended it when I sat down. Your pen accidentally slips into a certain vein and you must go on till you get it out clearly. If you had heard me telling Harry two or three times lately that I feared the fatal fascination of this place,--that I began to feel it taking little stitches in my soul,--you would have a different impression of my state than my above written words have left upon you.... I went out intending to stroll in the Boboli Garden, a wonderful old piece of last-century stateliness, but found it shut till twelve. So I returned to Harry's room, where I sit by the pungent wood fire writing this letter which I did not expect to begin till the afternoon, while he, just at this moment rising from the table where his quill has been busily scratching away at the last pages of his Turguenieff article, comes to warm his legs and puts on another log.... Good-bye beloved Sister, and Father and Mother.... Write repeatedly such nice long letters, and make glad the heart of both the Angel and the other brother, W. J. _To his Sister._ ROME, _Dec. 17, 1873_. BELOVED BEAUTLINGTON,--I cannot retire to rest on this eve of a well-filled day without imparting to thy noble nature a tithe of the enjoyment and happiness with which I am filled, and wishing you was here to take your share in it.... The barbarian mind stretches little by little to take in Rome, but I doubt if I shall ever call it the "city of my soul," or "my country." Strange to say, my very enjoyment of what here belongs to hoary eld has done more to reconcile me to what belongs to the present hour, business, factories, etc., etc., than anything I ever experienced. Every day I sally out into the sunshine and plod my way o'er steps of broken thrones and temples until one o'clock, when I repair to a certain café in the Corso, begin to eat and read "Galignani" and the "Débats," until Harry comes in with the flush of successful literary effort fading off his cheek. (It may interest the sympathetic soul of Mother to know that my diet until that hour consists of a roll, which a waiter in wedding costume brings up to my room when I rise, and three sous' worth of big roasted chestnuts, which I buy, on going out, from an old crone a few doors from the hotel. In this respect I am economical. Likewise in my total abstinence from spirituous liquors, to which Harry, I regret to say, has become an utter slave, spending a large part of his earnings in Bass's Ale and wine, and trembling with anger if there is any delay in their being brought to him.) After feeding, the Angel in his old and rather shabby striped overcoat, and I in my usual neat attire, proceed to walk together either to the big Pincian terrace which overhangs the city, and where on certain days everyone resorts, or to different churches and spots of note. I always dine at the table-d'hôte here; Harry sometimes, his indisposition lately (better the past two days) having made him prefer a solitary gorge at the restaurant. The people in the house are hardly instructive or exciting, but at dinner and for an hour after in the dining-room they very pleasantly kill time. I am become so far Anglicized that I find myself quite fearful of speaking too much to a family of three "cads" who sit opposite me at the table-d'hôte, and of whom the young lady (though rather greasy about the face) is very handsome and intelligent. In the evening I usually light my fire and read some local book.... I got a note from Hillebrand saying Schiff would gladly let me work in his laboratory if I liked. I suppose I ought if I can, but I hanker after home even at the price of a February voyage, and I hate to spend so much money here on my mere gizzard and cheeks.--There, my sweet sister, I hope that is a sufficiently spirited epistle for 10.30 P.M. When, oh, when, will you write me another like the solitary one I got from you in Florence? Seven weeks and one letter! C'est très caractéristique de vous! I wrote two days ago to Annie Ashburner. Tell the adorable Sara Sedgwick [Mrs. W. E. Darwin] that I can't possibly refrain much longer--in spite of my just resentment--from writing to her. Love to all.... Your W. J. * * * * * After his return his college duties proved both absorbing and stimulating. Beginning, as the reader has seen, as an instructor in the Department of Natural History, charged with teaching the comparative anatomy and physiology of vertebrates, he added a course on physiological psychology in 1876, and organized the beginnings of the psychological laboratory.[55] The next year this course was transferred to the Department of Philosophy and given under the title "Psychology." He contributed numerous reviews of scientific and philosophic literature, along with a few anonymous articles, to the columns of the "Atlantic Monthly" and the "Nation," and in 1878 appeared in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" and the "Critique Philosophique," with three important papers entitled "Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," "Brute and Human Intellect," and "Quelques Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective." Meanwhile his correspondence diminished to its minimum. When his brother Henry also came home to America in 1874, it ceased almost entirely. It did not begin to flow freely again, at least so far as letters are now recoverable, until after 1878. _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _June 25, 1874_. A few days ago came your letter from Florence of June 3, speaking of the glare on the _piazza_ and the coolness and space of your rooms, of your late dinners and your solitude, and of the progress of your novel, and, finally, of your expected departure about the 20th; so that I suppose you are today percolating the cool arcades of Bologna or the faded beauties of Verona, or haply [are] at Venice.... As the weeks glide by, my present life and my last year's life at home seem to glide together across the five months breach that Italy made in them, and to become continuous; while those months step out of the line and become a sort of side-decoration or picture hanging vaguely in my memory. As this happens more and more, I take the greater pleasure in it. Especially does the utter friendliness of Florence, Rome, etc., grow dear to me, and get strangely mixed up with still earlier and more faded impressions, derived I know not whence, which infused into the places when I first saw them that strange thread of familiarity. The thought of the Florentine places you name in your letters like "leiser Nachhall längst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit Errinnerungsschauer durch die Brust." I hope you'll pass through Dresden if you sail from Germany. I forgot to say that the Eagle line from Hamburg has now the largest and finest ships and the newest.... * * * * * Miss Theodora Sedgwick, to whom the next letter is addressed, was a member of the Stockbridge and New York family of that name, and a sister of Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton and Mrs. William Darwin, to whom reference has already been made. At this time she was living with two maiden aunts named Ashburner, friends of James's parents, in a house on Kirkland Street, Cambridge, not far from Mr. Norton's "Shady Hill." The letter of November 14, 1866, contained an allusion to this household, and others will occur as the letters proceed. _To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._ CAMBRIDGE, _Aug. 8, 1874_. MISS THEODORA SEDGWICK to WILLIAM JAMES, Dr. Aug. 6, to 1 Orchestra Seat in Hippodrome [Barnum's Circus] $1.00 " " " 2 carriage fares at 50c. $1.00 " " " 1 glass vanilla cream sodawater $ .10 " " " 1 plate of soup lost $ .25 " " " 4 hours time at 12-1/2 cents $ .50 " " " Sundries $ .05 ----- Total $2.90 Rec'd on account. $2.00 WM. JAMES HONORED MISS,--I hope you will find the aforesaid charges moderate. When you transmit me the 90 cents still due, please send back at the same time whatever letters of mine you may still have in your possession, and the diamonds, silks, etc., which you may have at different times been glad to receive from me. Likewise both pieces of the collar stud I so recently lavished upon you. We can then remain as strangers. I come of a race sensitive in the extreme; more accustomed to treat than to be treated, especially in this manner; and caring for its money as little as for its life. What wonder then that the mercenary conduct of One whom I have ever fostered without hope of pecuniary reward should work like madness in my brain? On the point of closing I see with rapture that a way of accommodation is still open! O joy! The salmon, blackberries, etc., I consumed, had a market value. By charging me for the tea 90 cents, you will make the thing reciprocal, and I will call the account square. Perhaps even then the dreadful feeling of wounded pride and Barnum-born resentment may with time fade away. Amen. Respectfully yours, W. J. _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _Jan._ [2], 1876. ...Your letter No. 2 speaking of your visit to Turguenieff was received by me duly and greatly enjoyed. I never heard you speak so enthusiastically of any human being. It is too bad he is to leave Paris; but if he gives you the "run" of Flaubert and eke George Sand, it will be so much gained. I don't think you know Miss A----, but if you did, you would thank me for pointing out to you the parallelism between her and George Sand which overwhelmed me the other day when I was calling on her, and she (who has just lost her sister B---- and had her father go through an attack of insanity) was snuggling down so hyper-comfortably into garrulity about B----, and her poor dead T---- and her dead mother, that I was fairly suffocated, just as I am by the _comfort_ George Sand takes in telling you of the loves of servant men for ladies, and other things _contra naturam_. Christmas passed off here in a rather wan and sallow manner. I got a gold scarf-ring from Mother and a gold watch-chain from Aunt Kate. Let me, by the way, advise you to get a scarf-ring; 't is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, in saving labor, silk and shirt fronts. Alice got a desk, and from me a Scotch terrier pup only seven weeks old, whom we call Bunch, who has almost doubled his size in a week, who is a perfect lion in determination and courage, and who don't seem to care a jot for any human society but that of Jane in the kitchen, whose person is, I suppose, pervaded by a greasy and smoky smell agreeable to his nostrils. He has a perfect passion for the dining-room; whenever he is left to himself, he travels thither and lies down under the table and takes no notice of you when you go to call him. He does not sleep half as much as Dido, never utters a sound when shut up for the night in the kitchen, and altogether fills us with a sort of awe for the Roman firmness and independence of his character. He is "animated" by a colliquative diarrhoea or cholera, which keeps us all sponging over his tracks, but which don't affect his strength or spirits a bit. He is in short a very queer substitute for poor, dear Dido.... _To Henry James._ NEWPORT, _June 3, 1876_. MY DEAR H.,--I write you after [a] considerable interval filled with too much work and weariness to make letter-writing convenient.... I ran away three days ago, the recitations being over for the year, in order to break from the studious associations of home. I have been staying at the Tweedies with Mrs. Chapman, and James Sturgis and his wife, and enjoying extremely, not the conversation indoors, but the lonely lying on the grass on the cliffs at Lyly Pond, and four or five hours yesterday at the Dumplings, feeling the moving air and the gentle living sea. There is a purity and mildness about the elements here which purges the soul of one. And I have been as if I had taken opium, not wanting to do anything else than the particular thing I happened to be doing at the moment, and feeling equally good whether I stood or walked or lay, or spoke or was silent. It's a splendid relief from the overstrain and stimulus of the past few scholastic months. I go the day after tomorrow (Monday) with the Tweedies to New York, assist at Henrietta Temple's wedding on Tuesday, and then pass on to the Centennial for a couple of days. I suppose it will be pretty tiresome, but I want to see the English pictures, which they say are a good show.... I fancy my vacationizing will be confined to visits of a week at a time to different points, perhaps the pleasantest way after all of spending it. Newport as to its villas, and all that, is most repulsive to me. I really didn't know how little charm and how much shabbiness there was about the place. There are not more than three or four houses out of the whole lot that are not offensive, in some way, externally. But the mild nature grows on one every day. This afternoon, God willing, I shall spend on Paradise.[56] The Tweedies keep no horses, which makes one walk more or pay more than one would wish. The younger Seabury told me yesterday that he was just reading your "Roderick Hudson," but offered no [comment]. Colonel Waring said of your "American" to me: "I'm not a blind admirer of H. James, Jr., but I said to my wife after reading that first number, 'By Jove, I think he's hit it this time!'" I think myself the thing opens very well indeed, you have a first-rate datum to work up, and I hope you'll do it well. Your last few letters home have breathed a tone of contentment and domestication in Paris which was very agreeable to get.... Your accounts of Ivan Sergeitch are delightful, and I envy you the possession of the young painter's intimacy. Give my best love to Ivan. I read his book which you sent home (foreign books sent by mail pay duty now, though; so send none but good ones), and although the vein of "morbidness" was so pronounced in the stories, yet the mysterious depths which his plummet sounds atone for all. It is the amount of life which a man feels that makes you value his mind, and Turguenieff has a sense of worlds within worlds whose existence is unsuspected by the vulgar. It amuses me to recommend his books to people who mention them as they would the novels of Wilkie Collins. You say we don't notice "Daniel Deronda." I find it extremely interesting. Gwendolen and her spouse are masterpieces of conception and delineation. Her ideal figures are much vaguer and thinner. But her "sapience," as you excellently call it, passes all decent bounds. There is something essentially womanish in the irrepressible garrulity of her moral reflections. Why is it that it makes women feel so good to moralize? Man philosophizes as a matter of business, because he must,--he does it to a purpose and then lets it rest; but women don't seem to get over being tickled at the discovery that they have the faculty; hence the tedious iteration and restlessness of George Eliot's commentary on life. The La Farges are absent. Yours always, W. J. * * * * * Under the title "Bain and Renouvier," James contributed a review containing a brief discussion of free will and determinism to the "Nation" of June 8, 1876. He of course sent a copy to Renouvier. The following letter begins with a reference to Renouvier's acknowledgment. James had been acquainted with Renouvier's work since 1868, when, as the reader will recall, he read a number of the "Année Philosophique," Renouvier's annual survey of contemporary philosophy, for the first time. The diary entry already quoted from the year 1870 has shown what effect Renouvier's essays then had on his mind. His admiration for the elder philosopher was great and he cherished it loyally for the rest of his life. Indeed, in the unfinished manuscript, which was published posthumously as "Some Problems of Philosophy," James looked back at the formative period of his own philosophical thinking and wrote: "Renouvier was one of the greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up." In time he made Renouvier's acquaintance in France and wrote to him often. He examined and discussed his writings with college classes. Occasionally he reported these discussions and read Renouvier's answers to the students. On the other side, Renouvier paid James the compliment of printing or translating several of his papers in the "Critique Philosophique," and thus brought him early to the notice of French readers. _To Charles Renouvier._ CAMBRIDGE, _July 29, 1876_. MY DEAR SIR,--I am quite overcome by your appreciation of my poor little article in the "Nation." It gratifies me extremely to hear from your own lips that my apprehension of your thoughts is accurate. In so despicably brief a space as that which a newspaper affords, I could hardly hope to attain any other quality than that, and perhaps clearness. I had written another paragraph of pure eulogy of your powers, which the editor suppressed, to my great regret, for want of room. I need not repeat to you again how grateful I feel to you for all I have learned from your admirable writings. I do what lies in my feeble power to assist the propagation of your works here, but _students_ of philosophy are rare here as everywhere. It astonishes me, nevertheless, that you have had to wait so long for general recognition. Only a few months ago I had the pleasure of introducing to your "Essais" two _professors_ of philosophy, able and learned men, who hardly knew your name!! But I am perfectly convinced that it is a mere affair of time, and that you will take your place in the general History of Speculation as the classical and finished representative of the tendency which was begun by Hume, and to which writers before you had made only fragmentary contributions, whilst you have fused the whole matter into a solid, elegant and definitive system, perfectly consistent, and capable, by reason of its moral vitality, of becoming popular, so far as that is permitted to philosophic systems. After your Essays, it seems to me that the only important question is the deepest one of all, the one between the principle of contradiction, and the _Sein und Nichts_.[57] You have brought it to that clear issue; and extremely as I value your logical attitude, it would be uncandid of me (after what I have said) not to confess that there are certain psychological and moral facts, which make me, as I stand today, unable wholly to commit myself to your position, to burn my ships behind me, and proclaim the belief in the _one_ and the many to be the Original Sin of the mind. I long for leisure to study up these questions. I have been teaching anatomy and physiology in Harvard College here. Next year, I add a course of physiological psychology, using, for certain practical reasons, Spencer's "Psychology" as a textbook. My health is not strong; I find that laboratory work and study, too, are more than I can attend to. It is therefore not impossible that I may in 1877-8 be transferred to the philosophical department, in which there is likely to be a vacancy. If so, you may depend upon it that the name of Renouvier will be as familiar as that of Descartes to the Bachelors of Arts who leave these walls. Believe me with the greatest respect and gratitude, faithfully yours, WM. JAMES. ...I must add a _vivat_ to your "Critique Philosophique," which keeps up so ably and bravely! And although it is probably an entirely superfluous recommendation, I cannot refrain from calling your attention to the most robust of English philosophic writers, [Shadworth] Hodgson, whose "Time and Space" was published in 1865 by Longmans, and whose "Theory of Practice," in two volumes, followed it in 1870. * * * * * In connection with the allusion to two professors of philosophy who hardly knew Renouvier's name, it would be fair to say that James was acutely conscious of the prevailing academic conditions. He was, in fact, one among a few younger men who were already rejuvenating the teaching of philosophy in American colleges. They began their work under difficult conditions. Dr. G. Stanley Hall wrote an open letter to the "Nation" in 1876, in which he said:-- "I have often wished that the 'Nation' would devote some space to the condition of philosophy in American colleges. Within the last few years I have visited the class-rooms of many of our best institutions, and believe that there are few if any branches which are so inadequately taught as those generally roughly classed as philosophy. Deductive logic, or the syllogism, is the most thoroughly dwelt upon, while induction, æsthetic and psychological and ethical studies, and especially the history of the leading systems of philosophy, ancient and modern, and the marvellous new developments in England and Germany, are almost entirely ignored. The persistent use of Hamilton, Butler's 'Analogy' and a score of treatises on 'moral science,' which deduce all the ground of obligation from theological considerations, as text-books, is largely responsible for the supposed unpopularity of the studies.... I think the success which has attended the recent lecture courses at Cambridge on modern systems of philosophy, and on æsthetic studies of literature and the fine arts, shows plainly how much might be accomplished in this direction by the proper method of instruction." James's comment on this, printed anonymously in the "Nation" for September 21, 1876, expressed his view of the situation more fully:-- "The philosophical teaching, as a rule, in our higher seminaries is in the hands of the president, who is usually a minister of the Gospel, and, as he more often owes his position to general excellence of character and administrative faculty than to any speculative gifts or propensities, it usually follows that 'safeness' becomes the main characteristic of his tuition; that his classes are edified rather than awakened, and leave college with the generous youthful impulse, to reflect on the world and our position in it, rather dampened and discouraged than stimulated by the lifeless discussions and flabby formulas they have had to commit to memory.... "Let it not be supposed that we are prejudging the question whether the final results of speculation will be friendly or hostile to the formulas of Christian thought. All we contend for is that we, like the Greeks and the Germans, should now attack things as if there were no official answer preoccupying the field. At present we are bribed beforehand by our reverence or dislike for the official answer; and the free-thinking tendency which the 'Popular Science Monthly,' for example, represents, is condemned to an even more dismal shallowness than the spiritualistic systems of our text-books of 'Mental Science.' We work with one eye on our problem, and with the other on the consequences to our enemy or to our lawgiver, as the case may be; the result in both cases is mediocrity. "If the best use of our colleges is to give young men a wider openness of mind and a more flexible way of thinking than special technical training can generate, then we hold that philosophy (taken in the broad sense in which our correspondent uses the word) is the most important of all college studies. However skeptical one may be of the attainment of universal truths (and to make our position more emphatic, we are willing here to concede the extreme Positivistic position), one can never deny that philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective. Touchstone's question, 'Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?' will never cease to be one of the tests of a wellborn nature. It says, Is there space and air in your mind, or must your companions gasp for breath whenever they talk with you? And if our colleges are to make men, and not machines, they should look, above all things, to this aspect of their influence.... "As for philosophy, technically so called, or the reflection of man on his relations with the universe, its educational essence lies in the quickening of the spirit to its _problems_. What doctrines students take from their teachers are of little consequence provided they catch from them the living, philosophic attitude of mind, the independent, personal look at all the data of life, and the eagerness to harmonize them.... "In short, philosophy, like Molière, claims her own where she finds it. She finds much of it today in physics and natural history, and must and will educate herself accordingly.... Meanwhile, when we find announced that the students in Harvard College next year may study any or all of the following works under the guidance of different professors,--Locke's 'Essay,' Kant's 'Kritik,' Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Hodgson's 'Theory of Practice,' and Spencer's 'Psychology,'--we need not complain of universal academic stagnation, even today." VIII 1878-1883 _Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European Colleagues--Death of his Parents_ EARLY in 1876 James had been introduced by their common friend Thomas Davidson (that ardent and lovable man whom he sketched with incomparable strokes in "A Knight Errant of the Intellectual Life") to Miss Alice H. Gibbens, and the next day he wrote to his brother Wilky that he had met "the future Mrs. W. J." Miss Gibbens had grown up in Weymouth, a pleasant little Massachusetts town in which several generations of her ancestors had lived comfortably and which was then still untouched by the "development" that later converted it and its neighbour, Quincy, into unseemly stone-quarriers' suburbs. In 1876 she had just returned, with her widowed mother and two younger sisters, from a five-years' residence in Europe and was teaching in a school for girls in Boston. On July 10, 1878, after a short engagement, he and Miss Gibbens were married by the Reverend Rufus Ellis at the house of the bride's grandmother in Boston. It must be left to a later day and a less intimate and partial hand to do adequate justice to a marriage which was happy in the rarest and fullest sense, and which was soon to work an abiding transformation in James's health and spirits. No mere devotion could have achieved the skill and care with which his wife understood and helped him. Family duties and responsibilities, often grave and worrisome enough, weighed lightly in the balance against the tranquillity and confidence that his new domesticity soon brought him. During the twenty-one years that immediately followed his marriage he accomplished an amount of teaching, college committee-service and administration, friendly and helpful personal intercourse with his students, reading and book-writing, original research, not to speak of his initial excursions into the field of psychical research, and a good deal of popular lecturing to eke out his income, that would have astonished anyone who had known him only during the early seventies, and that would have honored the capacity and endurance of any man. The serener tone of his letters soon contrasts itself with much that has gone before. The occasional references to fatigue, insomnia, and eye-strain, which still occur in his correspondence are explained by the amount of work he imposed upon himself rather than by the lack of strength with which he met his tasks. Meanwhile his wife, who entered into all his plans and undertakings with unfailing understanding and high spirit, stood guard over his library door, protected him from interruptions and distractions, managed the household and the children and the family business, helped him to order his day and to see and entertain his friends at convenient times, sped him off on occasional much-needed vacations, and encouraged him to all his major undertakings, with a sustaining skill and cheer which need not be described to anyone who knew his household. To the importance of her companionship it is still, happily, impossible to do justice. If consulted, she would not tolerate even this allusion; yet to gloss over her sustaining influence entirely would be to do injustice to James himself. * * * * * The summer of 1878 was momentous in James's life for another reason. In June, one month before his marriage, he contracted with Messrs. Henry Holt & Company to write a volume on Psychology for the "American Science Series" that they were beginning to publish. He was asked by Mr. Holt, in the course of preliminary correspondence, whether he could deliver the manuscript in a year's time. James replied (June, 1878): "My other engagements and my health both forbid the attempt to execute the work rapidly. Its quality too might then suffer. I don't think I could finish it inside of two years--say the fall of 1880." Thus he proposed to throw the book off rapidly. He doubtless conceived of it in the beginning as a more or less literary survey of the subject as it was then known, and he certainly did not foresee that he was going to devote twelve years of critical study and original research to its preparation. * * * * * Meanwhile, immediately after their marriage, James took his wife to the upper end of Keene Valley in the Adirondacks for the rest of the summer. They both knew and loved the region already. Indeed, although there has been no occasion to mention it before, Keene Valley had already become for James the playground toward which he turned most eagerly when summer came. It never lost its charm for him; he managed to spend a week or two of almost every year there or nearby; and allusions to the region will appear in a number of later letters. At the head of these valleys, in the basin of the Ausable Lakes and on the surrounding slopes of the most interesting group of mountains in the Adirondacks, a great tract of forest has been preserved. Giant, Noonmark, Colvin, and the Gothics raise their splendid ridges and summits to the enclosing horizon, and Dix, Haystack, and Marcy, the last the highest mountain of the Adirondack range, are within a day's walk of the little community that used to be known as "Beede's." Where the Ausable Club's picturesque golf-course is now laid out, the fields of Smith Beede's farm then surrounded his primitive, white-painted hotel. Half a mile to the eastward, in a patch of rocky pasture beside Giant Brook, stood the original Beede farm-house, and this Henry P. Bowditch, Charles and James Putnam, and William James had bought for a few hundred dollars (subject to Beede's cautious proviso in the deed that "the purchasers are to keep no boarders"). They had adapted the little story-and-a-half dwelling to their own purposes and converted its surrounding sheds and pens into habitable shanties of the simplest kind. So they established a sort of camp, with the mountains for their climbing, the brook to bathe in, and the primeval forest fragrant about them. With a friend or native guide,--or often alone, with a book and lunch in his light rücksack,--James would go off for a long day's walk on one of the mountain trails. He liked to start early and to spend several hours at mid-day stretched out on the sheltered side of an open ridge or summit. In this way he would combine a day of outdoor exercise with fifty to eighty pages of professional reading, the daily stint to which he often held himself in his holidays. In the summer of seventy-eight he planned to combine this sort of refreshment with work on the "Psychology." The plan seemed a little innocent to at least one friend,--Francis J. Child,--who said in a letter to James Russell Lowell: "William has already begun a Manual of Psychology--in the honeymoon;--but they are both writing it." _To Francis J. Child._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 16_ [1878]. CARISSIMO,--Daily since the first instant have we trembled with joyous expectancy of your holiday face arriving at our door. Daily have we dashed the teardrop of disappointment from our common eye! And now to get a letter instead of your revered form! It is shameful. We are dying with the tedium of each other's society and you would make the wheels of life go round again. Your excursion to Scarborough is simply criminal under the circumstances. You know we longed to see you. It is not too late to repair your fault, for although we shall not outstay the 1st of September, you would find the Putnams and the best thirty-five-year-old medical society in Boston to keep you company after we go. You had better come from Scarborough through Portland direct to Burlington by the White Mt. R.R. From Burlington take boat to Westport, whence stage to Beede's and our beating heart. But such is the crassitude of your malignity that after this we hardly dare expect you. Seriously, how could you be so insane? As for the remaining matter of your somewhat illegible letter, what is this mythological and poetical talk about psychology and Psyche and keeping back a manuscript composed during a honeymoon? The only Psyche now recognized by science is a decapitated frog whose writhings express deeper truths than your weakminded poets ever dreamed. _She_ (not Psyche but the bride) loves all these doctrines which are quite novel to her mind, hitherto accustomed to all sorts of mysticism and superstitions. She swears entirely by reflex action now, and believes in universal _Nothwendigkeit_. Hope not with your ballad-mongering ever to gain an influence. We have spent, however, a ballad-like summer in this delicious cot among the hills. We only needed crooks and a flock of sheep. I need not say that our psychic reaction has been one of content--perhaps as great as ever enjoyed by man. So farewell, false friend, till such near time as your ehrwürdig person decorate our hearth at Mrs. Hanks's in Harvard St. Communicate our hearty love to Mrs. Child and believe us your always doting (W. and A.) J. And for Heaven's sake _come_ while yet there is time! WM. * * * * * When the College opened in the autumn of seventy-eight James and his wife returned to Cambridge and lived for a few months in lodgings at 387 Harvard Street. The next letter begins a series from which a number of later letters will be given. One of the warmest of James's lifelong friendships was with Miss Frances R. Morse of Boston. The "exquisite Mary" referred to near the end is her sister, later Mrs. John W. Elliot. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 26, 1878_. _Our_ DEAR FANNY,--I (W.) shield myself under my wife's handwriting to drop that formal style of address which has so long cast its cold shadow over our intercourse, and for which, now that I have become an old fogy whilst you still remain a blooming child, there seems no further good reason. Are you willing that henceforward we should call each other by our first names? If so, respond in kind. I have got into the habit of dictating to _her_ all that I write, in order to save my eyes. This letter is from both of us. Your letter from Brighton of Oct. 15th was duly and gladly received. You have since then seen a great many things, and we have heard of you occasionally, latest of your ascent of the Nile with the Longfellows. They will be pleasant companions and I hope the long rest, delicious climate and beautiful outlook of that voyage will do ---- a world of good. It is too pitiful to think of her breaking down just at a time when one's active faculties have so much incitement to exert themselves. I am glad your mother is so much better. And how you will enjoy the sights of the winter! Don't you wish you had taken history instead of English literature! We are very happily "boarding" on the corner of Harvard and Ware Street, next door to old Mrs. Cary's, where the Tappans used to live. We have absolutely no housekeeping trouble; we live surrounded by our wedding presents, and can devote all our energies to studying our lessons, dining with our respective mothers-in-law, receiving and repaying our "calls," which average one a day, and anxiously keeping our accounts in a little book so as to see where the trouble is if both ends don't meet. We meant to have sent you this letter on Christmas day, but it was crowded out by many interruptions. We had, considering the age of the world and the hard times, quite a show of Xmas gifts and mild festivities. ...I suppose you get your "Nation" regularly on the Nile, so I make no comments on public affairs. We all feel sorry for poor old England just now. It really seems as if with us things were settling down upon a solid and orderly basis of general frugality. Keen cold weather, bare ground, and clear sky, west wind filling the air with clouds of frozen dust, and an engagement at the dentist's in an hour from this will seem to you on the Nile like tales told by an idiot. Still they are true for me. Pray write again and let us hear that you are all well, especially the exquisite Mary, to whom give lots of love, and with plenty to your parents and self, believe me, yours faithfully, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The passage which follows is taken from a letter to Mrs. James, of about this time. It is so unusual a bit of self-analysis that it is included here. James himself never failed to recognize that every man's thought is biased by his temperament as well as guided by purely rational considerations. _To Mrs. James._ ...I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "_This_ is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any _guaranty_ that they will. Make it a guaranty--and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am _überhaupt_ in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't smile at this--it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess.... W. J. * * * * * The next letter contains the first reference to work on the "Psychology." It also introduces into this volume the name and personality of a colleague-to-be with whom James's relations were destined to be close and permanent. Josiah Royce was then a young man "from the intellectual barrens of California" whose brilliant work was still to be done, and whose philosophic genius had not yet been disclosed to the public, although it may fairly be said to have been announced by every line of his engagingly Socrates-like face and figure. He had been born and brought up among the most primitive surroundings in Grass Valley, California, and won his way to a brief period of study in Germany and to a degree at Johns Hopkins in 1878. While yet a student there, he paid a visit to Cambridge, and he has left his own quotable record of the meeting which resulted, and of what followed. "My real acquaintance with [James] began one summer-day in 1877, when I first visited him in [his father's] house on Quincy Street, and was permitted to pour out my soul to somebody who really seemed to believe that a young man might rightfully devote his life to philosophy if he chose. I was then a student at the Johns Hopkins University. The opportunities for a life-work in philosophy in this country were few. Most of my friends and advisers had long been telling me to let the subject alone. Perhaps, so far as I was concerned, their advice was sound; but in any case I was, so far, incapable of accepting that advice. Yet if somebody had not been ready to tell me that I had a right to work for truth in my own way, I should ere long have been quite discouraged. I do not know what I then could have done. James found me at once--made out what my essential interests were at our first interview, accepted me with all my imperfections, as one of those many souls who ought to be able to find themselves in their own way, gave a patient and willing ear to just my variety of philosophical experience, and used his influence from that time on, not to win me as a follower, but to give me my chance. It was upon his responsibility that I was later led to get my first opportunities here at Harvard."[58] The opportunities did not ripen until 1882-83, however; and in the meanwhile Royce returned to the young University of California as an instructor in logic and rhetoric. Letters written to him there will show how cordially James continued to sympathize with the aspirations of his young friend, and how eagerly he fostered the possibility of an appointment to the Harvard philosophical department. When the opportunity arose, James seized it. Thereafter he and Royce saw each other so constantly in Cambridge that there were not many occasions for either to write letters to the other. Instead, allusions to Royce appear frequently in the letters to other people. The philosophical club which is alluded to at the end of the letter was presided over by Dr. W. T. Harris and held informal meetings in Boston during this one winter. Its purpose was to read and discuss Hegel. Dr. C. C. Everett, Prof. G. H. Palmer, and Thomas Davidson were among the members. _To Josiah Royce._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 16_ [1879]. MY DEAR ROYCE,--Your letter was most welcome. I had often found myself wondering how you were getting on, and your wail as the solitary philosopher between Behrings' Strait and Tierra del Fuego has a grand, lonesome picturesqueness about it. I am sorry your surroundings are not more mentally congenial. But recollect your extreme youth and the fact that you are making a living and practising yourself in the pedagogic art, _überhaupt_. You might be forced to do something much farther away from your chosen line, and even then not make a living. I think you are a lucky youth even as matters stand. Unexpected chances are always turning up. A fortnight ago President Eliot was asked to recommend some one for a $5000 professorship of philosophy in the New York City College. One Griffin of Amherst was finally appointed. I imagine that Gilman [of Johns Hopkins] is keeping his eye on you and only waiting for the disgrace of youth to fade from your person. I liked your article on Schiller very much, and hope you will send more to Harris. That most villainous of editors, as I am told, has himself been to Baltimore lately as an office-seeker. But the rumor may be false. In some respects he might be a useful man for the Johns Hopkins University, but I would give no more for his judgment than for that of a Digger Indian. I hope you will write something about Hodgson. He is quite as worthy as Kant of supporting any number of parasites and partial assimilators of his substance. My sentence, I perceive, has a rather uncomplimentary sound. I meant only to say that you should not be deterred from treating him in your own way from fear of inadequacy. All his commentators must undoubtedly be inadequate for some time to come; but they will all help each other out. He seems to me the wealthiest mine of thought I ever met with. With me, save for my eyes, things are jogging along smoothly. I am writing (very slowly) what may become a text-book of psychology. A proposal from Gilman to teach in Baltimore three months yearly for the next three years had to be declined as incompatible with work here. I will send you a corrected copy of Harris's journal with my article on Space, which was printed without my seeing the proof. I suppose you subscribe to "Mind." The only decent thing I have ever written will, I hope, appear in the July number of that sheet.[59] The delays of publication are fearful. Most of this was written in 1877. If it ever sees the light, I hope you will let me know what you think of it, and how it tallies with your own theory of the Concept, which latter I would fain swallow and digest. I wish you belonged to our philosophic club here. It is very helpful to the uprooting of weeds from one's own mind as well as the detection of beams in one's neighbor's eyes. Write often and believe me faithfully yours, WM. JAMES. _To Josiah Royce._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 3, 1880_. BELOVED ROYCE!--So far was I from having forgotten you that I had been revolving in my mind, on the very day when your letter came, the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead and buried or had become an idiot or were sick or blind or what, that you sent no word of yourself. _I_ am blind as ever, which may excuse my silence. First of all _Glückwünsche_ as to your _Verlobung_! which, like the true philosopher that you are, you mention parenthetically and without names, dates, numbers of dollars, etc., etc. I think it shows great sense in her, and no small amount of it in you, whoe'er she be. I have found in marriage a calm and repose I never knew before, and only wish I had done the thing ten years earlier. I think the lateness of our usual marriages is a bad thing, and hope your engagement will not last very long. It is refreshing to hear your account of philosophic work.... I'm sorry you've given up your article on Hodgson. He _is_ obscure enough, and makes me sometimes wonder whether the _ignotum_ does not pass itself off for the _magnifico_ in his pages. I enclose his photograph as a loan, trusting you will return it soon. I will never write again for Harris's journal. He refused an article of mine a year ago "for lack of room," and has postponed the printing of two admirable original articles by T. Davidson and Elliot Cabot for the last ten months or more, in order to accommodate Mrs. Channing's verses and Miss----'s drivel about the school of Athens, etc., etc. It is too loathsome. Harris has resigned his school position in St. Louis and will, I am told, come East to live. I know not whether he means to lay siege to the Johns Hopkins professorship. My ignorant prejudice against all Hegelians, except Hegel himself, grows wusser and wusser. Their sacerdotal airs! and their sterility! Contemplating their navels and the syllable _oum_! My dear friend Palmer, assistant professor of philosophy here, is already one of the white-winged band, having been made captive by Caird in two summers of vacation in Scotland.... The ineffectiveness and impotence of the ending of [Caird's] work on Kant seem to me simply scandalous, after its pretentious (and able) beginning. What do you think of Carveth [Reid]'s Essay on Shadworth [Hodgson]? I haven't read it. Our Philosophic Club here is given up this year--I think we're all rather sick of each other's voices. My teaching is small in numbers, though my men are good. I've tried Renouvier as a text-book--for the last time! His exposition offers too many difficulties. I enjoyed your Rhapsody on Space, and hereby pledge myself to buy two copies of your work ten years hence, and to devote the rest of my life to the propagation of its doctrines. I despise my own article,[60] which was dashed off for a momentary purpose and published for another. But I don't see why its main doctrine, from a psychologic and sublunary point of view, is not sound; and I think I can, if my psychology ever gets writ, set it down in decently clear and orderly form. All _deducers_ of space are, I am sure, mythologists. You are, after all, not so very much isolated in California. We are all isolated--"columns left alone of a temple once complete," etc. Books are our companions more than men. But I wish nevertheless, and firmly expect, that somehow or other you will get a call East, and within my humble sphere of power I will do what I can to further that end. My accursed eye-sight balks me always about study and production. _Ora pro me!_ With most respectful and devout regards to the fair Object, believe me always your WM. JAMES. _To Charles Renouvier._ CAMBRIDGE, _June 1, 1880_. MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--My last lesson in the course on your "Essais" took place today. The final examination occurs this week. The students have been profoundly interested, though their reactions on your teaching seem as diverse as their personalities; one (the maturest of all) being yours body and soul, another turning out a strongly materialistic fatalist! and the rest occupying positions of mixed doubt and assent; all however (but one) being convinced by your treatment of freedom and certitude. As for myself, I must frankly confess to you that I am more unsettled than I have been for years. I have read several times over your reply to Lotze, and your reply to my letter. The latter was fully discussed in the class. The former seems to me a perfectly masterly expression of a certain intellectual position, and with the latter, I think it makes it perfectly clear to me where our divergence lies. I can formulate all your reasonings for myself, but--dare I say it?--they fail to awaken conviction. It seems as if, the simpler the point, the more hopeless the disagreement in philosophy. But I will enter into no further discussion now. I think it will be profitable for me, for some time to come, inwardly to digest the matters in question and your utterances before trying to articulate any more opinions. I am overwhelmed with duties at present, and shall very shortly sail for England to pass part of the vacation; maybe I shall get to the Continent and see you. If we meet, I hope you will treat my heresies on the question of the Infinite with the indulgence and magnanimity which your doctrine of freedom in theoretic affirmations exacts!! I will send you in a day or two an essay which develops your psychology of the voluntary process, and which I hope will give you pleasure. Pray excuse the haste and superficiality of this note, which is only meant to explain why I do not write at greater length and to announce my hope of soon grasping you by the hand and assuring you in person of my devotion and indebtedness. Always yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * James sailed in June a good deal fagged by his year's work, and got back by the first week of September, having spent most of the interval seeking solitude and refreshment in the Alps and Northern Italy. On his way home he paid his respects to Renouvier at Avignon, but otherwise made no effort to meet his European colleagues. _To Charles Renouvier._ CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 27, 1880_. MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--Your note and the conclusion of my article in the "Critique" came together this morning. It gives me almost a feeling of pain that you, at your age and with your achievements, should be spending your time in translating my feeble words, when by every principle of right I should be engaged in turning your invaluable writings into English. The state of my eyes is, as you know, my excuse for this as for all other shortcomings. I have not even read the whole of your translation of [my] "Feeling of Effort," though the passages I have perused have seemed to me excellently well done. My exposition strikes me as rather complicated now. It was written in great haste and, were I to rewrite it, it should be simpler. The omissions of which you speak are of no importance whatever. I have read your discussion with Lotze in the "Revue Philosophique" and agree with Hodgson that you carry off there the honors of the battle. _Quant au fond de la question_, however, I am still in doubt and wait for the light of further reflexion to settle my opinion. The matter in my mind complicates itself with the question of a universal ego. If time and space are not _in se_, do we not need an enveloping ego to make continuous the times and spaces, not necessarily coincident, of the partial egos? On this question, as I told you, I will not fail to write again when I get new light, which I trust may decide me in your favor. My principal amusement this winter has been resisting the inroads of Hegelism in our University. My colleague Palmer, a recent convert and a man of much ability, has been making an active propaganda among the more advanced students. It is a strange thing, this resurrection of Hegel in England and here, after his burial in Germany. I think his philosophy will probably have an important influence on the development of our liberal form of Christianity. It gives a quasi-metaphysic backbone which this theology has always been in need of, but it is too fundamentally rotten and charlatanish to last long. As a reaction against materialistic evolutionism it has its use, only this evolutionism is fertile while Hegelism is absolutely sterile. I think often of the too-short hours I spent with you and Monsieur Pillon and wish they might return. Believe me with the warmest thanks and regards, yours faithfully, WM. JAMES. * * * * * In August of 1882 James arranged with the College for a year's leave of absence, and sailed for Europe again, this time with the double purpose of giving himself a vacation and of meeting some of the European investigators who were working on the problems in which he had become absorbed. He landed in England, and paused there just long enough to throw his brother Henry into the state of half-resentful bewilderment that invariably resulted from their first European reunions. Henry, to whom Europe, and England in particular, had already become an absorbing passion and for whom American reactions upon Europe were still an unexhausted theme, greeted every arriving American with eager curiosity and a confident expectation that the stranger would "register" impressions of the most charming enchantment and pleasure for his edification. William, on the other hand, was always most under the European spell when in America; and--whether moved by the constitutional restlessness that seized him so soon as ever he began to travel, or by the perversity that was a fascinating trait in his character and was usually provoked by his younger brother's admiring neighborhood--he was always most ardently American when on European soil. Thus his first words of greeting to Henry on stepping out of the steamer-train were: "My!--how cramped and inferior England seems! After all, it's poor old Europe, just as it used to be in our dreary boyhood! America may be raw and shrill, but I could never live with this as you do! I'm going to hurry down to Switzerland [or wherever] and then home again as soon as may be. It was a mistake to come over! I thought it would do me good. Hereafter I'll stay at home. You'll have to come to America if you want to see the family." The effect on Henry can better be imagined than described. Time never accustomed him to these collisions, even though he learned to expect them. England inferior! A mistake to come abroad! Horror and consternation are weak terms by which to describe his feelings; and nothing but a devotion seldom existing between brothers, and a lively interest in the astonishing phenomenon of such a reaction, ever carried him through the hour. He usually ended by hurrying William onward--anywhere--within the day if possible--and remained alone to ejaculate, to exclaim and to expatiate for weeks on the rude and exciting cyclone that had burst upon him and passed by. On this occasion it took only two days for William to start on from London for the Rhine, Nüremburg, and Vienna; then to Venice, where he idled for the first half of October. After this short pause he returned to Prague; and then, working northward, consumed the autumn in visiting the universities of Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Liège and Paris. Intimate letters to his wife, who had remained in Cambridge with their two little boys, are almost the only ones that survive. A few passages from these will therefore be included. _To Mrs. James._ VIENNA, _Sept. 24, 1882_. ...I wish you could have been with me yesterday to see some French pictures at the "Internationale Kunst Ausstellung"; they gave an idea of the vigor of France in that way just now. One, a peasant woman, in all her brutish loutishness sitting staring before her at noonday on the grass she's been cutting, while the man lies flat on his back with straw hat over face. She with such a look of infinite unawakenedness, such childlike virginity under her shapeless body and in her face, as to make it a poem.[61] Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I've got since I've been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing, in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep. "They are our conscripts." They are the venerable ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed old creatures have; and I'm glad and proud, when I think of my own dear Mother with tears running down my face, to know that she is one with these.[62] Good-night, good-night!... _To Mrs. James._ AUSSIG, BOHEMIA, _Nov. 2, 1882_. ...As for Prague, _veni, vidi, vici_. I went there with much trepidation to do my social-scientific duty. The mighty Hering in especial intimidated me beforehand; but having taken the plunge, the cutaneous glow and "euphoria" (_vide_ dictionary) succeeded, and I have rarely enjoyed a forty-eight hours better, in spite of the fact that the good and sharp-nosed Stumpf (whose book "�ber die Raumvorstellungen" I verily believe thou art capable of never having noticed the cover of!) insisted on trotting me about, day and night, over the whole length and breadth of Prague, and that [Ernst] Mach (Professor of Physics), genius of all trades, simply took Stumpf's place to do the same. I heard [Ewald] Hering give a very poor physiology lecture and Mach a beautiful physical one. I presented them with my visiting card, saying that I was with their "Schriften sehr vertraut und wollte nicht eher Prague verlassen als bis ich wenigstens ein Paar Worte mit ihnen umtauschte," etc.[63] They received me with open arms. I had an hour and a half's talk with Hering, which cleared up some things for me. He asked me to come to his house that evening, but I gave an evasive reply, being fearful of boring him. Meanwhile Mach came to my hotel and I spent four hours walking and supping with him at his club, an unforgettable conversation. I don't think anyone ever gave me so strong an impression of pure intellectual genius. He apparently has read everything and thought about everything, and has an absolute simplicity of manner and winningness of smile when his face lights up, that are charming. With Stumpf I spent five hours on Monday evening (this is Thursday), three on Wednesday morning and four in the afternoon; so I feel rather intimate. A clear-headed and just-minded, though pale and anxious-looking man in poor health. He had another philosopher named Marty [?] to dine with me yesterday--jolly young fellow. My native _Geschwätzigkeit_[64] triumphed over even the difficulties of the German tongue; I careered over the field, taking the pitfalls and breastworks at full run, and was fairly astounded myself at coming in alive. I learned a good many things from them, both in the way of theory and fact, and shall probably keep up a correspondence with Stumpf. They are not so different from us as we think. Their greater thoroughness is largely the result of circumstances. I found that I had a more _cosmopolitan_ knowledge of modern philosophic literature than any of them, and shall on the whole feel much less intimidated by the thought of their like than hitherto. My letters will hereafter, I feel sure, have a more jocund tone. Damn Italy! It isn't a good thing to stay with one's inferiors. With the nourishing breath of the German air, and the sort of smoky and leathery German smell, vigor and good spirits have set in. I have walked well and slept well and eaten well and read well, and in short begin to feel as I expected I should when I decided upon this arduous pilgrimage. Prague is a ---- city--the adjective is hard to find; not magnificent, but everything is too honest and homely,--we have in fact no English word for the peculiar quality that good German things have, of depth, solidity, picturesqueness, magnitude and homely goodness combined. They have worked out a really great civilization. "Dienst ist Dienst"![65] said the gateman of a certain garden yesterday afternoon whom Stumpf was trying to persuade to let me in, as an American, to see the view five minutes after the closing hour had struck. _Dienst ist Dienst._ That is really the German motto everywhere--and I should like to know what American would ever think of justifying himself by just that formula. I say German of Prague, for it seems to me, in spite of the feverish nationalism of the natives, to be outwardly a pure German city.... * * * * * BERLIN, _Nov. 9, 1882_. ...Yesterday I went to the veterinary school to see H. Munk, the great brain vivisector. He was very cordial and poured out a torrent of talk for one and a half hours, though he could show me no animals. He gave me one of his new publications and introduced me to Dr. Baginsky (Professor Samuel Porter's favorite authority on the semicircular canals, whose work I treated superciliously in my article). So we opened on the semicircular canals, and Baginsky's torrent of words was even more overwhelming than Munk's. I never felt quite so helpless and small-boyish before, and am to this hour dizzy from the onslaught. In the evening at the house of Gizycki (a Docent on Ethics), to a "privatissimum" with a supper after it. Good, square, deep-chested talk again, which I couldn't help contrasting with the whining tones of our students and of some of the members of the Hegel Club--I hate to leave the wholesome, tonic atmosphere, the land where one talks best when he talks manliest--slowest, distinctest, with most deliberate emphasis and strong voice.... * * * * * LEIPZIG, _Nov. 11, 1882_. ...Jones spoilt my incipient nap this afternoon and I adjourned to his room to meet Smith and Brown[66] again, with another American wild-cat reformer. Jones is too many for me--I'm glad I'm to get far off. Religion is well, moral regeneration is well, so is improvement of society, so are the courage, disinterestedness, ideality of all sorts, these men show in their lives; but I verily believe that the condition of being a man of the world, a gentleman, etc., carries something with it, an atmosphere, an outlook, a play, that all these things together fail to carry, and that is worth them all. I got so suffocated with their everlasting spiritual gossip! The falsest views and tastes somehow in a man of fashion are truer than the truest in a plebeian cad. And when I told the new man there that a "materialist" would have no difficulty in keeping his place in Harvard College provided he was well-bred, I said what was really the highest test of the College excellence. I suppose he thought it sounded cynical. _Their_ sphere is with the masses struggling into light, not with us at Harvard; though I'm glad I can meet them cordially for a while now and then. Thou see'est I have some "spleen" on me today.... * * * * * LEIPZIG, _Nov. 13, 1882_. ...Yesterday was a splendid day within and without.... The old town delightful in its blackness and plainness. I heard several lecturers. Old Ludwig's lecture in the afternoon was memorable for the extraordinary impression of character he made on me. The traditional German professor in its highest sense. A rusty brown wig and broad-skirted brown coat, a voluminous black neckcloth, an absolute unexcitability of manner, a clean-shaven face so plebeian and at the same time so grandly carved, with its hooked nose and gentle kindly mouth and inexhaustible patience of expression, that I never saw the like. Then to Wundt, who has a more refined elocution than any one I've yet heard in Germany. He received me very kindly after the lecture in his laboratory, dimly trying to remember my writings, and I stay over today, against my intention, to go to his _psychologische Gesellschaft_ tonight. Have been writing psychology most all day.... * * * * * In train for LI�GE, _Nov. 18, 1882_. ...I believe I didn't tell you, in the bustle of traveling, much about Wundt. He made a very pleasant and personal impression on me, with his agreeable voice and ready, tooth-showing smile. His lecture also was very able, and my opinion of him is higher than before seeing him. But he seemed very busy and showed no desire to see more of me than the present interview either time. The _psychologische Gesellschaft_ I stayed over to see was postponed, but he did not propose to me to do anything else--to the gain of my ease, but to the loss of my vanity. Dear old Stumpf has been the friendliest of these fellows. With him I shall correspond.... * * * * * LI�GE, _Nov. 20, 1882_. ...I am still at Delboeuf's, aching in every joint and muscle, weary in every nerve-cell, but unable to get away till tomorrow noon. I was to have started today.... The total lesson of what I have done in the past month is to make me quieter with my home-lot and readier to believe that it is one of the chosen places of the Earth. Certainly the instruction and facilities at our university are on the whole superior to anything I have seen; the rawnesses we mention with such affliction at home belong rather to the century than to us (witness the houses here); we are not a whit more isolated than they are here. In all Belgium there seem to be but two genuine philosophers; in Berlin they have little to do with each other, and I really believe that in my way I have a wider view of the field than anyone I've seen (I count out, of course, my ignorance of ancient authors). We are a sound country and my opinion of our essential worth has risen and not fallen. We only lack abdominal depth of temperament and the power to sit for an hour over a single pot of beer without being able to tell at the end of it what we've been thinking about. Also to reform our altogether abominable, infamous and infra-human voices and way of talking. (What _further_ fatal defects hang together with that I don't know--it seems as if it must carry something very bad with it.) The first thing to do is to establish in Cambridge a genuine German plebeian Kneipe club, to which all instructors and picked students shall be admitted. If that succeeds, we shall be perfect, especially if we talk therein with deeper voices.... _To Henry James._ PARIS, _Nov. 22, 1882_. DEAR H.,--Found at Hottinguer's this A.M. your letter with all the enclosures--and a wail you had sent to Berlin. Also six letters from my wife and seven or eight others, not counting papers and magazines. I will mail back yours and father's letter to me. Alice [Mrs. W. J.] speaks of father's indubitable improvement in strength, but our sister Alice apparently is somewhat run down.--Paris looks delicious--I shall try to get settled as soon as possible and meanwhile feel as if the confusion of life was recommencing. I saw in Germany all the men I cared to see and talked with most of them. With three or four I had a really nutritious time. The trip has amply paid for itself. I found third-class _Nichtraucher_ almost always empty and perfectly comfortable. The great use of such experiences is less the definite information you gain from anyone, than a sort of solidification of your own foothold on life. Nowhere did I see a university which seems to do for _all_ its students anything like what Harvard does. Our methods throughout are better. It is only in the select "Seminaria" (private classes) that a few German students making researches with the professor gain something from him personally which his genius alone can give. I certainly got a most distinct impression of my own _information_ in regard to _modern_ philosophic matters being broader than that of any one I met, and our Harvard post of observation being more cosmopolitan. Delboeuf in Liège was an angel and much the best teacher I've seen....[67] "The Century," with your very good portrait, etc., was at Hottinguer's this A.M., sent by my wife. I shall read it presently. I'm off now to see if I can get your leather trunk, sent from London, arrested by inundations, and ordered to be returned to Paris. I never needed its contents a second. And in your little American valise and my flabby black hand-bag and shawl-straps and a small satchel, I carried not only everything I used, but collected a whole library of books in Leipsig, some pieces of Venetian glass in their balky bolsters of seaweed, a quart bottle of eau de Cologne, and a lot of other acquisitions. I feel remarkably tough now, and fairly ravenous for my psychologic work. Address Hottinguer's. W. J. * * * * * James's mother had died during the preceding winter. Now, just after his arrival in Paris, he received news that his father was dangerously ill. He went to London immediately, with the intention of getting home as soon as possible. On arriving at his brother Henry's lodgings, he found that Henry had already sailed. He also received a despatch advising him that the danger was not immediate and that he should wait. He remained, but with misgivings which the next news intensified. _To his Father._ BOLTON ST., LONDON, _Dec. 14, 1882_. DARLING OLD FATHER,--Two letters, one from my Alice last night, and one from Aunt Kate to Harry just now, have somewhat dispelled the mystery in which the telegrams left your condition; and although their news is several days earlier than the telegrams, I am free to suppose that the latter report only an aggravation of the symptoms the letters describe. It is far more agreeable to think of this than of some dreadful unknown and sudden malady. We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part. I stayed here only in obedience to the last telegram, and am waiting now for Harry--who knows the exact state of my mind, and who will know yours--to telegraph again what I shall do. Meanwhile, my blessed old Father, I scribble this line (which may reach you though I should come too late), just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating,--so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence. You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see them well taken care of, and that your words shall not suffer for being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may remember in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and elsewhere, was an admirer of the "Secret of Swedenborg," and Hodgson told me your last book had deeply impressed him. So will it be; especially, I think, if a collection of _extracts_ from your various writings were published, after the manner of the extracts from Carlyle, Ruskin, & Co. I have long thought such a volume would be the best monument to you.--As for us; we shall live on each in his way,--feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my _sympathy_ with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade--and not for the sake of regrets.--As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I _can't_ say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that _were_ true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don't see you again--Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM. * * * * * The elder Henry James died on the nineteenth of December. A cablegram was sent to London; and on learning of his father's death, James wrote a letter to his wife from which the following extract is taken. _To Mrs. James._ ...Father's boyhood up in Albany, Grandmother's house, the father and brothers and sister, with their passions and turbulent histories, his burning, amputation and sickness, his college days and ramblings, his theological throes, his engagement and marriage and fatherhood, his finding more and more of the truths he finally settled down in, his travels in Europe, the days of the old house in New York and all the men I used to see there, at last his quieter motion down the later years of life in Newport, Boston and Cambridge, with his friends and correspondents about him, and his books more and more easily brought forth--how long, how long all these things were in the living, but how short their memory now is! What remains is a few printed pages, us and our children and some incalculable modifications of other people's lives, influenced this day or that by what he said or did. For me, the humor, the good spirits, the humanity, the faith in the divine, and the sense of his right to have a say about the deepest reasons of the universe, are what will stay by me. I wish I could believe I should transmit some of them to our babes. We all of us have some of his virtues and some of his shortcomings. Unlike the cool, dry thin-edged men who now abound, he was full of the fumes of the _ur-sprünglich_ human nature; things turbid, more than he could formulate, wrought within him and made his judgments of rejection of so much of what was brought [before him] seem like revelations as well as knock-down blows.... I hope that rich soil of human nature will not become more rare!... * * * * * Two months later James said in a letter to Mrs. Gibbens: "It is singular how I'm learning every day now how the thought of his comment on my experiences has hitherto formed an integral part of my daily consciousness, without my having realized it at all. I interrupt myself incessantly now in the old habit of imagining what he will say when I tell him this or that thing I have seen or heard." * * * * * James remained in London until mid-February of 1883, and took advantage of the opportunity to see more of certain men there--among them Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, Croom Robertson, Frederick Pollock, Leslie Stephen, Carveth Reid, and Francis Galton. His eyes were troubling him again, but he did some writing on psychology. After paying another short visit to Paris, he sailed for home in March. IX 1883-1890 _Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress of 1889_ JAMES had now found his feet, professionally, as well as in other ways. He strode ahead on the next stage of his journey with a firmness of which he would have been incapable in the seventies, and carried a heavy burden of work forward, with never a long halt and without ever setting it down, until he had finished the two large volumes of the "Principles of Psychology" in 1890. The previous decade had counted steadily for inward clarification, for health and for confidence. He was no longer harassed by serious illnesses and pursued by the spectre of possible invalidism. Marriage, parenthood--these immense events in a man's spiritual journey--had happened for him within the last four years and had brought him new loves and ambitions. He was no longer perplexed by misgivings about his aims and abilities, but had arrived at the conception of his treatise on psychology and had begun to formulate its chapters. He had become a very successful teacher, and might fairly have suspected himself of being an inspiring one. His work was beginning to be well known outside the halls of his own University. It is not the purpose of this book to trace the origin of his ideas or their influence on contemporary discussion. But any reader who will glance at Professor Perry's annotated "List" of his published work may see that he had written important papers by 1883, and that most of what was original in his psychology must by then have been present to his mind. During the visit he had just made to Europe, he had got a personal impression of the transatlantic colleagues whose writings had interested him especially, and had spent many hours in the company of certain among them with whom he found himself to be particularly in sympathy. Thus he had gained a bracing sense of comradeship with the men who were collaborating in his field. Last of all, he had brought home with him a happy conviction that the most propitious place for him to teach and write his book in was the philosophical department of his own University. So far as the "textbook on Psychology" was concerned, however, he still underestimated the amount of original investigation and thought which his instinct for "concrete" reality was to exact of him. Perhaps also he made too little allowance for the inadequacies of current laboratory methods and of the existing literature of the subject. Helmholtz and Wundt had already published important reports from their laboratories in Germany; but psychology was still generally considered to be an inductive science, which achieved its purposes by introspection and description, and which had no very broad connection with physiology nor many laboratory methods of its own. James had still to help make a modern science of it by his own immense effort. He may perhaps be said to have set to work when he offered the course on "The Relation between Physiology and Psychology" to graduate students in 1875, and made the class take part in experiments which he arranged in a room in the Lawrence Scientific School building.[68] Thus with teaching, experimenting, and occasionally writing out his conclusions as he went along, he ploughed his way through his subject. The triple process is familiar enough today to most men of science. But James and the majority of his contemporaries had been trained differently or not at all; and their generation, following a few great leaders like Pasteur, Darwin and Helmholtz, had to establish new standards of criticism and new methods of inquiry in every department of science. When the "Psychology" was drawing to its completion, James wrote two sentences about his difficulties to his brother Henry. They might equally well have been written at any other time during the eighties. "I have," he said, "to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. It is like walking through the densest brush-wood." * * * * * There was one peculiarly stubborn and irreducible class of facts which he took up and gave much thought to during this period. As early as 1869 he had recognized the desirability of examining the class of phenomena that are popularly called psychic[69] in a critical and modern spirit. This was not because he was in the least impressed by the lucubrations of the kind of mind which can be well described, in Macaulay's phrase, as "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition." But an instinctive "love of sportsmanlike fair play" was stirred in him by the indifference with which men who professed to be students of nature,[70] and particularly scientists whose prime concern was with our mental life, usually declined to examine phenomena which have occurred in every known human race and generation. He was in cordial sympathy with the announced intention of the Society for Psychical Research to investigate the abnormal and "supernormal" occurrences. He referred aptly to such occurrences as "wild facts," having as yet no scientific "stall or pigeon-hole."[71] Above all, he was conscious, from the beginning, of the proximity and possible relevance to his psychological and philosophical problems of this large body of unanalyzed material. Most people cannot approach such matters without emotional bias. The atmosphere in which the public discussion of them goes on is still poisoned by superstition and clouded by prejudice. No scientific man involves himself in such inquiries, even now, without the certitude that his statements will be misconstrued by some of his professional brethren, and that his name will be taken in vain by newspapers and charlatans. James recognized all this, but saw in it no excuse for avoiding the subject; rather, a reason for examining it in an unprejudiced spirit and for avowing his conclusions openly. The English Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882. In 1884 James became a corresponding member and concerned himself actively in organizing an American society of the same name in Boston. He made contributions to the "Proceedings" of this society during the six years of its existence; and, when it amalgamated with the English Society in 1890, he became a Vice-President of the latter. With the exception of a term during which he served as its President (in 1894-95), he continued to be a Vice-President of the S. P. R. until his death, and occasionally published through its "Proceedings." In the eighties he took up his share of the drudgery which was involved in investigating alleged cases of apparition, thought-transference, and mediumship. For one entire winter he and Professor G. H. Palmer attended "cabinet séances" every Saturday without discovering anything that they could report as other than fraudulent. But in the following year he got upon the track of the now famous Mrs. Piper, and he made his first report on her trance-state to the S. P. R. in 1886. After many tests and trials he was unable to "resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears and wits." Withholding his acceptance from the spirit-message hypothesis, he added: "What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not a glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape."[72] He continued to find time for the investigation of other cases, and could sometimes console himself by laughing over expeditions which were quite fruitless of interesting result. A few sentences from letters addressed to Mrs. James in 1888, reporting an adventure with Richard Hodgson in New York, will serve as illustration:-- "[Apr. 6.] Hodgson and I started after our baggage arrived, to find Mr. B----, who, you may have seen by the papers, is making a scandal by having given himself over (hand and foot) to a medium, 'Madam D----,' who does most extraordinarily described physical performances. We found the old girl herself, a type for Alexandre Dumas, obese, wicked, jolly, intellectual, with no end of go and animal spirits, who entertained us for an hour, gave us an appointment for a sitting on Monday, and asked us to come and see Mr. B. tonight. What will come of it all I don't know. It will be baffling, I suppose, like everything else of that kind." "[Apr. 7.] Mr. B. and Mrs. D. were 'too tired' to see us last night! I suspect that will be the case next Monday. It is the knowing thing to do under the circumstances. But that woman is one with whom one would fall _wildly_ in love, if in love at all--she is such a fat, _fat_ old villain...." "[Apr. 24th.] In bed at 11.30, after the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anæmic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds! Give me a full blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D.--when shall I look upon her like again?" In 1889 James undertook the labor of conducting the "Census of Hallucinations" in America. The census sought to discover, from lists of people selected at random, how many of them, when in good health and awake, had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. James received about seven thousand answers to the inquiries that were sent out in America; and after he had digested and reported them, the results turned out to be in remarkable conformity with the returns from other parts of the world. Some of James's own deductions from the returns will be found in the essay, "What Psychical Research has Accomplished."[73] Among other things, the census showed apparitions corresponding with a distant event as occurring more than four hundred times oftener than could be expected from a calculation of chances. After this task had been completed, he usually avoided spending time in personal investigations. _To Charles Renouvier._ KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 5, 1883_ ADIRONDACKS. MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--My silence has been so protracted that I fear you must have wondered what its reasons could be. Only the old ones!--much to do, and little power to do it, obliging procrastination. You will doubtless have heard from the Pillons of my safe return home. I have spent the interval in the house of my mother-in-law in Cambridge, trying to do some work in the way of psychologic writing before the fatal day should arrive when the College bell, summoning _me_ as well as my colleagues to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost impossible. Although my bodily condition, thanks to my winter abroad, has been better than in many years at a corresponding period, what I succeeded in accomplishing was well-nigh zero. I floundered round in the morasses of the theory of cognition,--the Object and the Ego,--tore up almost each day what I had written the day before, and although I am inwardly, of course, more aware than I was before of where the difficulties of the subject lie, outwardly I have hardly any manuscript to show for my pains. Your unparalleled literary fecundity is a perfect wonder to me. You should return pious thanks to the one or many gods who had a hand in your production, not only for endowing you with so clear a head, but for giving you so admirable a working temperament. The most rapid piece of literary work I ever did was completed ten days ago, and sent to "Mind," where it will doubtless soon appear. I had promised to give three lectures at a rather absurd little "Summer School of Philosophy," which has flourished for four or five years past in the little town of Concord near Boston, and which has an audience of from twenty to fifty persons, including the lecturers themselves; and, finding at the last moment that I could do nothing with my much meditated subject of the Object and the Ego, I turned round and lectured "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,"[74] and wrote the substance of the lectures out immediately after giving them--the whole occupying six days. I hope you may read the paper some time and approve it--though it is out of the current of your own favorite topics and consequently hardly a proper candidate for the honours of translation in the "Critique." I understand now why no really good classic manual of psychology exists; why all that do exist only treat of particular points and chapters with any thoroughness. It is impossible to write one at present, so infinitely more numerous are the difficulties of the task than the means of their solution. Every chapter bristles with obstructions that refer one to the next ten years of work for their mitigation. With all this I have done very little consecutive reading. I have not yet got at your historic survey in the "Critique Religieuse," for which my brain nevertheless itches. But I have read your articles apropos of Fouillée, and found them--the latest one especially--admirable for clearness and completeness of statement. Surely nothing like them has ever been written--no such stripping of the question down to its naked essentials. Those who, like Fouillée, have the intuition of the Absolute Unity, will of course not profit by them or anything else. Why can all others view their own beliefs as _possibly_ only hypotheses--_they_ only not? Why does the Absolute Unity make its votaries so much more _conceited_ at having attained it, than any other supposed truth does? This inner sense of superiority to all antagonists gives Fouillée his _fougue_ and adds to his cleverness, and no doubt increases immensely the effectiveness of his writing over the average reader's mind. But it also makes him careless and liable to overshoot the mark. I have just been interrupted by a visit from Noah Porter, D.D., President of Yale College, whose bulky work on "The Human Intellect" you may have in your library, possibly. An American college president is a very peculiar type of character, partly man of business, partly diplomatist, partly clergyman, and partly professor of metaphysics, armed with great authority and influence if his college is an important one--which Yale is; and Porter is the paragon of the type--_bonhomme et rusé_, learned and simple, kindhearted and sociable, yet possessed of great decision and obstinacy. He is over seventy, but comes every summer here to the woods to refresh himself by long mountain walks and life in "camp," sleeping on a bed of green boughs before a great fire in the open air. He looks like a farmer or a fisherman, and there is no sort of human being who does not immediately feel himself entirely at home in his company. I have been here myself just a week. The virgin forest comes close to our house, and the diversity of walks through it, the brooks and the ascensions of hilltops are infinite. I doubt if there be anything like it in Europe. Your mountains are grander, but you have nowhere this carpet of absolutely primitive forest, with its indescribably sweet exhalations, spreading in every direction unbroken. I shall stay here doing hardly any work till late in September. I need to lead a purely animal life for at least two months to carry me through the teaching year. My wife and two children are here, all well. I would send you her photograph and mine, save that hers--the only one I have--is too bad to send to anyone, and my own are for the moment exhausted. I find myself counting the years till my next visit to Europe becomes possible. Then it shall occur under more cheerful circumstances, if possible; and I shall stay the full fifteen months instead of only six. As I look back now upon the winter, I find the strongest impression I received was that of the singularly artificial, yet deeply vital and soundly healthy, character of the English social and political system as it now exists. It is one of the most _bizarre_ outbirths of time, one of the most abnormal, in certain ways, and yet one of the most successful. I know nothing that so much confirms your philosophy as this spectacle of an accumulation of individual initiatives _all preserved_. I hope both you and the Pillons are well. I shall never forget their friendliness, nor the spirit of human kindness that filled their household. I am ashamed to ask for letters from you, when after so long a silence I can myself give you so little that is of philosophic interest. But we must take long views; and, if life be granted, I shall do something yet, both in the way of reading and writing. Ever truly yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * At about this time Major Henry L. Higginson, then the junior partner in the banking house of Lee, Higginson & Company and soon to be widely known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, undertook to look after the small patrimony which James had inherited. He tactfully assumed the initiative respecting whatever had to be done, and continued to render this friendly service as long as James lived. On his side James, who knew nothing about investments and was incapable of considering them without involving himself in excessive and unprofitable worry, was delighted to leave decisions to his friend's wiser judgment. Occasional jocose communications like the following came to be almost his only incursions into his own "affairs." _To Henry L. Higginson._ _Oct. 14_ [1883?]. MY DEAR HENRY,--I receive today from your office two documents, one containing some unintelligible hieroglyphics, "C. B.& Q., 138" etc., etc.; the other winding up with a statement that I owe you $12,674.97!! The latter explains your mysterious interest in my affairs. I feared as much! Go on, Shylock, go on! you have me in your power. The peculiar combination of ignorance and poverty which I present makes me an easy victim. And I confess that as a psychologist I am curious to see how far your instincts of cupidity will carry you. I await eagerly the ulterior developments. Yours, etc., WM. JAMES. [_Enclosed with the foregoing_] Extract from a biographic sketch of W. J. soon to be published in the "Harvard Register":-- "He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every talk of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position; but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it." _To H. P. Bowditch._ [Post-card] CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _Jan. 31_ [1884]. Heute den 31ten Januar wurde mir vor 2 Stunden in rascher Aufeinander-folge _ein_ (1) wunderschöner jüdischaussehender, kräftiger und munterer Knabe geboren. Alles geht nach Wunsch, und bittet um stiller Theilnahme der glückliche Vater. W. J. [_Translation._] Today the 31st of January, two hours since, there was born to me in rapid succession _one_ (I) wonderfully beautiful, Jewish-looking, sturdy and lively boy. Everything is going as one would wish, and the happy father craves your hushed sympathy. W. J. _To Thomas Davidson._ CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 30, 1884_. MY DEAR DAVIDSON,--I am in receipt of two letters from you since my last, the latest one of them from Capri. I am very sorry to hear of your continued bad physical condition. You have a queer constitution,--with such an unusual amount of strength in most ways,--to be a constant prey to ailment. I have long ago come to think that the right measure of a man's health is not how much comfort or discomfort he feels in the year, but how much work, through thick and thin, he manages to get through. Judged by that standard, you doubtless score an unusually high number. But when I hear you talking about Texas, I confess I really begin to feel alarmed. From Rome to Austin! How can you think of such a thing? Are you sure M---- is not playing the part of the tailless fox in the fable? I know not a living soul in Texas, and if I did I should have moral scruples about becoming an accomplice in any plot for transporting you there. Why is it that everything in this world is offered us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study. Teaching duties have really devoured the whole of my time this winter, and with hardly any intellectual profit whatever. I have read nothing, and written nothing save one lecture on the freedom of the will. How it is going to end, I don't well see. The four months of non-lecturing study I had at home last year, when I slept well and led a really intellectual life, seem like a sort of lost paradise. However, vacations make amends. This summer I am to edit my poor father's literary remains, "with a sketch of his writings" which will largely consist of extracts and no doubt help to the making him better known. You ask why I don't write oftener. If you could see the arrears of work under which my table groans, and the number of semi-business letters and notes I now have to write with my infernal eyesight, you would ask no longer. In fact I am beginning to ask whether it be not my bounden duty to stop corresponding with my friends altogether. Only at that price does there seem to be any prospect of doing any reading at all. I had neither seen your article in the Unitarian Review[75] nor heard of it, but ran for it as soon as I got your announcement of its existence. I know not what to think of it practically; though I confess the idea of engrafting the bloodless pallor of Boston Unitarianism on the Roman temperament strikes one at first sight as rather queer. Unitarianism seems to have a sort of moribund vitality here, because it is a branch of protestantism and the tree keeps the branch sticking out. But whether it could be grafted on a catholic trunk seems to me problematic. I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of that element which in the past has presided over the origin of all religions, namely, a belief in new _physical_ facts and possibilities. Abstract considerations about the soul and the reality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those of the present life, afforded by an extension of our insight into the order of nature, would do in an instant. Are the much despised "Spiritualism" and the "Society for Psychical Research" to be the chosen instruments for a new era of faith? It would surely be strange if they were; but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work. I like your formula that in consciousness there must be two irreducibles, "being and feeling," and nothing else. But I can't put philosophy into letters. When is our long-postponed talk to take place? _Aufgeschoben_ for another summer, and I fear another winter too, from what you write. It is too bad! We have a week's recess in a couple of days and I start to look up summer lodgings. Alice and the two-month-old baby are very well and send you love. Always truly yours, WM. JAMES. _To G. H. Howison._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1885_. MY DEAR HOWISON,--I've just reread (for the fourth time, I believe) your letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76] Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting the _same depths_. Such is this depth of the _problem_ of determinism--howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a _problem_. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual respect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministically) _impossible from eternity_, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure worship, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism. Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply mean _ultimate_ non-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally legitimate reactions. _Indifferentism_ is the true condition of such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that at least gives me something definite to worship and fight for. However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware that this position, like everything else, is a _parti pris_ and a _pis aller_,--_faute de mieux_,--to continue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticize his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man from whom nothing is too great to expect. Your list of thirty lectures makes one bow down in reverence before you. I should be afraid you were over-working. Your Hume-Kant circular shall be diligently scanned when my Hume lectures come off, in about six weeks. I am better as to the eyes, which gives me much hope. Am, however, "maturing" building plans for a house, which is bad for sleep. I do hope and trust there will be no "Enttäuschung" about Berkeley,[77] and that not only the work, but the place and the climate, may prove well adapted to both you and Mrs. Howison. Ever truly yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which had just been published, and in which William James had collected a number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to Godkin have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate review to which they refer. They furnish too good an illustration of James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science. _To E. L. Godkin._ CAMBRIDGE, [_Feb._] 16, 1885. MY DEAR GODKIN,--Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last review of my father--a writer exclusively religious--a personage seems to have been selected for whom the religious life is complete _terra incognita_. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is another. Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile. I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. I _may_ get there the week after next, and if so shall claim _one_ dinner, over which I trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best respects to Mrs. Godkin, always truly yours WM. JAMES. _To E. L. Godkin._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 19, 1885_. MY DEAR GODKIN,--Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed you as the official head. And my _emotion_ was less that of filial injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in giving out the book to the wrong _sort_ of person altogether--a Theist of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that the thing should have distressed you so much more than it did me. You can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation" probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that savage sheet. I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. Godkin will come _mit_. Always truly yours WM. JAMES. _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ CAMBRIDGE, _20 Feb., 1885_. MY DEAR HODGSON,--Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. For I fear he found _me_ pretty unresponsive during his lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of no one except Carlyle who had such a smiting _Ursprünglichkeit_ of intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like Carlyle in being no _reasoner_ at all, in the sense in which philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity of exposition for them both. His _ideas_, however, were the exact inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. _Those_ elements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under "Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or ethereal worlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that somebody could _take up_ something from his system into a system more articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel the _presence_ of something real and true for the while they read, and go away and presently, unable to dovetail [it] into their own framework, forget it altogether. I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain to assimilating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that is felt is unthought, and that as thought [it] goes and must go unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it. You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism. I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own! WM. JAMES _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 1, 1885_. ...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,--you never knew such an improvement! It has continued gradually, so that practically I can use them all I will. It saves my life. _Why_ it should come now, when, bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after tomorrow I shall start for the South Shore to look up summer quarters. I want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately, through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall, _sans faute_. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!... _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ NEWPORT, _Dec. 30, 1885_. MY DEAR HODGSON,--I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience" address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united,--although 'tis true she unites them afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations. Always hitherto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I caught could not be _all_. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for me 'tis not enough. Your "method" (which surely after _this_ needs no additional expository touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughly _intelligible_ in nature? And what the practical outcome of the distinction between _whatness_ and _thatness_ save the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths, which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of both articles about Conscience, etc.--which is original and beautiful and which I feel I have not yet assimilated. I will only ask whether all you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so that _all_ reflective _cognitive_ judgments, as well as practical judgments, project themselves ideally into eternity?) As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,--nothing like it in that respect since Berkeley,--but it hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions between _vis impressa_ and _vis insita_, and compulsion and "reaction" _mean_ nothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were such a monism a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things, of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole. The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you disdain to notice, namely that we _cannot_ rejoice in such a whole, for it is _not_ a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, we _must treat_ it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way to _break_ the world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as against the latter. I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I can _not_ understand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones--unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way life _is_ made up. For life _is_ evil. Two souls are in my breast; I see the better, and in the very act of seeing it I do the worse. To say that the molecules of the nebula implied this and _shall have implied it_ to all eternity, so often as it recurs, is to condemn me to that "dilemma" of pessimism or subjectivism of which I once wrote, and which seems to have so little urgency to you, and to which all talk about abstractions erected into entities; and compulsion _vs._ "freedom" are simply irrelevant. What living man cares for such niceties, when the real problem stares him in the face of how practically to meet a world foredone, with no possibilities left in it? What a mockery then seems your distinction between determination and compulsion, between passivity and an "activity" every minutest feature of which is preappointed, both as to its _whatness_ and as to its _thatness_, by what went before! What an insignificant difference then the difference between "impediments from within" and "impediments from without"!--between being fated to do the thing _willingly_ or not! The point is not as to how it is done, but as to its being done at all. It seems a wrong complement to the rest of life, which rest of life (according to your precious "free-will determinism," as to any other fatalism), whilst shrieking aloud at its _whatness_, nevertheless exacts rigorously its _thatness_ then and there. Is that a reasonable world from the moral point of view? And is it made more reasonable by the fact that when I brought about the _thatness_ of the evil _whatness_ decreed to come by the _thatness_ of all else beside, I did so consentingly and aware of no "impediments outside of my own nature"? With what can I _side_ in such a world as this? this monstrous indifferentism which brings forth everything _eodem jure_? Our nature demands something _objective_ to take sides with. If the world is a Unit of this sort there _are_ no sides--there's the moral rub! And you don't see it! Ah, Hodgson! Hodgson _mio!_ from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers! _Perchè di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?_[78] If you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us to _Evil_, but don't talk of the distinction between impediments from within and without when the within and the without of which you speak are both within that _Whole_ which is the only real agent in your philosophy. There is no such superstition as the idolatry of the _Whole_. I originally finished this letter on sheet number one--but it occurred to me afterwards that the end was too short, so I scratched out the first lines of the crossed writing, and refer you now to what follows them.--[_Lines from sheet number I._] It makes me sick at heart, this discord among the only men who ought to agree. I am the more sick this moment as I must write to your ancient foe (at least the stimulus to an old "Mind" article of yours), one F. E. Abbot who recently gave me his little book "Scientific Theism"--the burden of his life--which makes me groan that I cannot digest a word of it. Farewell! Heaven bless you all the same--and enable you to forgive me. We are well and I hope you are the same. Ever faithfully yours, W. J. [_From the final sheet._] Let me add a wish for a happy New Year and the expression of my undying regard. You are tenfold more precious to me now that I have braved you thus! Adieu! _To Carl Stumpf._ CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 1, 1886_. MY DEAR STUMPF,--...Let me tell you of my own fate since I wrote you last. It has been an eventful and in some respects a sad year. We lost our youngest child in the summer--the flower of the flock, 18 months old--with a painful and lingering whooping-cough complicated with pneumonia. My wife has borne it like an angel, however, which is something to be thankful for. Her mother, close to whom we have always lived, has had a severe pulmonary illness, which has obliged her to repair to Italy for health. She is now on the Ocean, with her youngest and only unmarried daughter, the second one having only a month ago become the wife of that [W. M.] Salter whose essays on ethics have lately been translated by von Gizycki in Berlin. So I have gained him as a brother-in-law, and regard it as a real gain. I have also gained a full Professorship with an increase of pay, and have moved into a larger and more commodious house.[79] My eyes, too, are much better than they were a year ago, and I am able to do more work, so there is plenty of sweet as well as bitter in the cup. I don't know whether you have heard of the London "Society for Psychical Research," which is seriously and laboriously investigating all sorts of "supernatural" matters, clairvoyance, apparitions, etc. I don't know what you think of such work; but I think that the present condition of opinion regarding it is scandalous, there being a mass of testimony, or apparent testimony, about such things, at which the only men capable of a critical judgment--men of scientific education--will not even look. We have founded a similar society here within the year,--some of us thought that the publications of the London society deserved at least to be treated as if worthy of experimental disproof,--and although work advances very slowly owing to the small amount of disposable time on the part of the members, who are all very busy men, we have already stumbled on some rather inexplicable facts out of which something may come. It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are _impossible_. My teaching is much the same as it was--a little better in quality, I hope. I enjoy very much a new philosophic colleague, Josiah Royce, from California, who is just thirty years old and a perfect little Socrates for wisdom and humor. I still try to write a little psychology, but it is exceedingly slow work. No sooner do I get interested than bang! goes my sleep, and I have to stop a week or ten days, during which my ideas get all cold again. Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.... I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for psycho-physics which I started last year, but of which I fear the _fruits_ will be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way as that against the growing tendency to _subjectivism_ in one's thinking, as life goes on. I am hypnotizing, on a large scale, the students, and have hit one or two rather pretty unpublished things of which some day I hope I may send you an account.... Ever faithfully yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * When the American Society for Psychical Research was organized in Boston in the autumn of 1884, Thomas Davidson wrote to comment on its apparent anti-spiritual bias. In the following reply, dated February 1, 1885, but more easily understood if inserted here out of its chronological place, James defined the society's conception of its function. In so doing he described his own attitude toward psychical research quite exactly:-- "As for any 'antispiritual bias' of our Society, no theoretic basis, or _bias_ of any sort whatever, so far as I can make out, exists in it. The one thing that has struck me all along in the men who have had to do with it is their complete colorlessness philosophically. They seem to have no preferences for any general _ism_ whatever. I doubt if this could be matched in Europe. Anyhow, it would make no difference in the important work to be done, what theoretic bias the members had. For I take it the urgent thing, to rescue us from the present disgraceful condition, is to ascertain in a manner so thorough as to constitute _evidence_ that will be accepted by outsiders, just what the _phenomenal conditions of certain_ concrete phenomenal occurrences are. Not till that is done, can spiritualistic or anti-spiritualistic theories be even mooted. I'm sure that the more we can steer clear of theories at first, the better. The choice of officers was largely dictated by motives of policy. Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all truth than others, but that their adhesion would popularly seem better _evidence_ than the adhesion of others, in the matter. And what we want is not only truth, but evidence. We shall be lucky if our scientific names don't grow discredited the instant they subscribe to any 'spiritual' manifestations. But how much easier to discredit literary men, philosophers or clergymen! I think Newcomb, for President, was an uncommon hit--if he believes, he will probably carry others. You'd better chip in, and not complicate matters by talking either of spiritualism or anti-spiritualism. '_Facts_' are what are wanted." _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1886_. MY DEAR HARRY,--I seize my pen the first leisure moment I have had for a week to tell you that I have read "The Bostonians" in the full flamingness of its bulk, and consider it an exquisite production. My growling letter was written to you before the end of Book I had appeared in the "Atlantic"; and the suspense of narrative in that region, to let the relation of Olive and Verena grow, was enlarged by the vacant months between the numbers of the magazine, so that it seemed to me so slow a thing had ne'er been writ. Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. I've only read one number of the "Princess Casamassima"--though I hear all the people about me saying it is the best thing you've done yet. To return to "The Bostonians"; the two last books are simply sweet. There isn't a hair wrong in Verena, you've made her neither too little nor too much--but absolutely _liebenswürdig_. It would have been so easy to spoil her picture by some little excess or false note. Her moral situation, between Woman's rights and Ransom, is of course deep, and her discovery of the truth on the Central Park day, etc., inimitably given. Ransom's character, which at first did not become alive to me, does so, handsomely, at last. In Washington, Hay told me that Secretary Lamar was delighted with it; Hay himself ditto, but especially with "Casamassima." I enclose a sheet from a letter of Gurney's but just received. You see how seriously he takes it. And I suppose he's right from a profoundly serious point of view,--_i.e._, he would be right if the characters were real,--but as the story stands, I don't feel his objection. The _fancy_ is more tickled by R.'s victory being complete. I hear very little said of the book, and I imagine it is being less read than its predecessors. The truth about it, combining what I said in my previous letter with what I have just written, seems to be this, that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the _datum_ seems to me to belong rather to the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500--charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work--but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art. I can truly say, however, that as I have lain on my back after dinner each day for ten days past reading it to myself, my enjoyment has been complete. I imagine that inhabitants of other parts of the country have read it more than natives of these parts. They have bought it for the sake of the information. The way you have touched off the bits of American nature, Central Park, the Cape, etc., is exquisitely true and calls up just the feeling. Knowing you had done such a good thing makes the meekness of your reply to me last summer all the more wonderful. I cannot write more--being much overloaded and in bad condition. The spring is opening deliciously--all the trees half out, and the white, bright, afternoon east winds beginning. Our household is well.... Don't be alarmed about the labor troubles here. I am quite sure they are a most healthy phase of evolution, a little costly, but normal, and sure to do lots of good to all hands in the end. I don't speak of the senseless "anarchist" riot in Chicago, which has nothing to do with "Knights of Labor," but is the work of a lot of pathological Germans and Poles. I'm amused at the anti-Gladstonian capital which the English papers are telegraphed to be making of it. All the Irish names are among the killed and wounded policemen. Almost every anarchist name is Continental. Affectly., W. J. * * * * * James read "The Bostonians," and wrote to his brother about it, with that special shade of detachment which is peculiar to fraternal judgments. He was less careful to measure his praise when he wrote to other authors about their novels. _To W. D. Howells._ JAFFREY, N.H., _July 21, 1886_. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I "snatch" a moment from the limitless vacation peace and leisure in which I lie embedded and which doesn't leave me "time" for anything, to tell you that I have been reading your "Indian Summer," and that it has given me about as exquisite a kind of delight as anything I ever read in my life, in the line to which it belongs. How you tread the narrow line of nature's truth so infallibly is more than I can understand. Then the profanity, the humor, the humanity, the morality--the everything! In short, 'tis cubical, and set it up any way you please 'twill stand. That blessed young female made me squeal at every page. How _can_ you have got back to the conversations of your prime? But I won't discriminate or analyze. This is only meant for an inarticulate cry of _viva Howells_. I repeat it: long live Howells! God grant you may do as good things again! I don't believe you can do better. With warmest congratulations to Mrs. Howells that you _and_ she were born, I am ever yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * Mr. Howells called such letters "whoops of blessing." When a new book pleased James particularly, he was apt to send a "whoop" to its author. With respect to the next letter, it will be recalled that Croom Robertson was the Editor of "Mind." Richard Hodgson was later for many years the Secretary of the American Branch of the Society for Psychical Research, in Boston. He became a warm friend. Other allusions to him occur later. _To G. Croom Robertson._ _Aug. 13, 1886_. MY DEAR ROBERTSON,--...I have just been reading the last number of "Mind," and find it rather below par. R. Hodgson muddled, clotted, dusky and ineffectual, save for a gleam or two of light in as many separate points. How can an adult man spend his time in trying to torture an accurate meaning into Spencer's incoherent accidentalities? It is so much more easy to do the work over for oneself. I rubbed my eyes at the Macdonald paper, as a dim sense came over me that it might be a Divinity student who "sat under" me for a part of last year. I ween it is. Little did I know the viper I was nourishing. Why don't you have a special "Neo-Hegelian Department" in "Mind," like the "Children's Department" or the "Agricultural Department" in our newspapers--which educated readers skip? With Montgomery's paper I am for the most part in warm sympathy, though he might make a discrimination or two more. I'm sorry I've not yet read his first number. His non-empirical style, so different from that of the British school, will stand in the way of his views' deglutition by the ordinary reader. I've got the same stuff all neatly down in black and white, in a very empirical style, which alas! must wait perhaps years till the other chapters are finished. However, in these matters, no matter how much different men strike the same vein, they do it in such different _ways_, that no one of them absolutely supersedes the need of the others. Davidson I saw the other day in Cambridge. He was fresh from the Concord School, where they had been belaboring Goethe as their _pièce de résistance_ and topping off with pantheism as dessert. He had read aloud a paper of Montgomery's against pantheism, as well as one of his own on Goethe's Titanism. Montgomery's is shortly to appear in a journal here. I am rather curious to read it. To go on with "Mind," Hull's paper (Donaldson's) is refreshing. X---- is a little stub-and-twist fellow who also sat under me last year, and now has a fellowship for next year. He is a silent, mannerless little cub, but has first-rate stuff in him, I think, as an original worker; theological training. Have you had time yet to look into Royce's book? Royce seems to me to be a man of the greatest promise, performance too, in that book. I wish you would have it worthily reviewed. Here I have run on about the accidents of the hour, instead of the eternal things of the soul. No matter; all is a symbol, and these words will probably waft my presence somehow into yours.... Pray drop me even a short line soon, to let me know about you and Mrs. Robertson. I've heard nothing _of_ you, even, for many months. Haven't you a brother, or something, to send over here, since there seems no hope of having you yourself? Gurney wrote the other day that he was about to send his brother. Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heartiest affection, Yours always, WM. JAMES. _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ JAFFREY, N.H., _Sept. 12, 1886_. MY DEAR HODGSON,--I ought long ere this to have written you a genuine letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3, _respective_ March 6. (The latter by the way came to me many weeks too late, all blurred and water-stained, with a notice gummed on it telling as how it had been rescued from the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This makes it ex-as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does honor to our nineteenth-century post-office perfection.) I suppose one reason for my procrastination has been the shrinking-back of the fleshly man from another gnashing of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just been reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are--also your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I'm blest if they make me budge an inch from my inveterate way of looking at the question. I hate to think that controversy should be useless, and arguments of no avail, but the history of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very short, hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!" The subject of my concern seems entirely different from yours. I care absolutely nothing whether there be "agents" or no agents, or whether man's actions be really "_his_" or not. What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a real outward application. All those who, like you, hold that the world is a system of "uniform law" which repels all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it seems to me, the world to be judged integrally. Now the only _integral_ emotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world as this of our experience, is that of dramatic or melodramatic interest--romanticism--which _is_ the emotional reaction upon it of all intellects who are neither religious nor moral. The moment you seek to go deeper, you must break the world into parts, the parts that seem good and those that seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about overcoming the bonds of good and evil, for _us_ there is no higher synthesis in which their contradiction merges, no _one_ way of judging that world which holds them both. Either close your eyes and adopt an optimism or a pessimism equally daft; or exclude moral categories altogether from a place in the world's definition, which leaves the world _unheimlich_, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking to it that the moral judgment _is_ applicable, give up the hope of applying it to the _whole_, and admit that, whilst some parts are good, others are bad, and being bad, _ought_ not to have been, "argal," possibly _might_ not have been. In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds with which the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uniformity and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely nothing to do. But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I promised, and feel more like gossiping with you as a friend than wrangling with you as a foe. I hope things are going well with you in these months and that politics have not exasperated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing.... I got successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact that I wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research" and had other interruptions from work which I would fain have done. I intend _per fas aut nefas_ to make more time for myself next year. The family is very well; and with the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of weeks, the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I wish I could live in the country all the year round, or rather nine months of it. When I retire from the harness, if that ever happens, I probably shall. I have just been on a little trip to the White Mountains and may possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a convenient and romantic neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap--the natives going West, the Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain 3500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A rivulet of great beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I can get the strip between it and the lake shore to buy.... I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation, Bradley's "Logic." I suppose you have read it. It is surely "epoch-making" in English philosophy. Both empiricists and pan-rationalists must settle their accounts with it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he personally? Whether churlish and sour, or simply redundantly ironical and irrepressible, I can't make out from his polemic tone; but should apprehend the former. It will be long ere I settle my accounts with his book. Well! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your viciousness in the matter of determinism! Send me all you write and believe me as ever, Always most affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * With respect to the next letter, and others to James's sister, which follow, it should now be explained that Miss Alice James had gone abroad in 1885. The illness which was the cause of her journey developed more and more serious complications. Being near her brother Henry in England, she stayed on there during the remaining six years of her life. In spite of much suffering, she never let herself adopt an invalidish tone,[80] but kept her attention turned toward things outside her sick-room, and was apt to greet expressions of commiseration in a way to discourage their repetition--as the following letter testifies. "K. P. L." was a devoted friend, Miss Katharine P. Loring of Boston; "A. K." was the Aunt Kate mentioned in early letters. _To his Sister._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1887_. DEAREST ALICE,--Your card and, a day or two later, K. P. L.'s letter to A. K., have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, for which I am sorrier than I can express, and can only take refuge in the hope, incessantly springing up again from its ashes, that you will "recuperate" more promptly than of late has been the case. I'm glad, at any rate, that it has got you into Harry's lodgings for a while, and hope your next permanent arrangement will prove better than the last. When, as occasionally happens, I have a day of headache, or of real sickness like that of last summer at Mrs. Dorr's, I think of you whose whole life is woven of that kind of experience, and my heart sinks at the horizon that opens, and wells over with pity. But when all is over, the longest life appears short; and we had better drink the cup, whatever it contains, for it _is_ life. But I will not moralize or sympathize, for fear of awakening more "screams of laughter" similar to those which you wrote of as greeting my former attempts. We have had but one letter from Harry--soon after his arrival at Florence. I hope he has continued to get pleasure and profit from his outing. I haven't written to him since he left London, nor do I now write him a special letter, but the rest of this is meant for him as well as you, and if he is still to be away, you will forward it to him. We are getting along very well, on the whole, I keeping very continuously occupied, but not seeming to get ahead much, _for the days grow so short_ with each advancing year. A day is now about a minute--hardly time to turn round in. Mrs. Gibbens arrived from Chicago last night, and in ten days she and Margaret will start, with our little Billy, for Aiken, S.C., to be gone till May. B. is asthmatic, she is glad to go south for her own sake, and the open-air life all day long will be much better for him than our arduous winter and spring. He is the most utterly charming little piece of human nature you ever saw, so packed with life, impatience, and feeling, that I think Father must have been just like him at his age.... I have been paying ten or eleven visits to a mind-cure doctress, a sterling creature, resembling the "Venus of Medicine," Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham,[81] made solid and veracious-looking. I sit down beside her and presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so restless, etc. She said my _eyes_, mentally speaking, kept revolving like wheels in front of each other and in front of my face, and it was four or five sittings ere she could get them _fixed_. I am now, _unconsciously to myself_, much better than when I first went, etc. I thought it might please you to hear an opinion of my mind so similar to your own. Meanwhile what boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o' nights, as I still do? Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun. I seized the opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and see just what was needed to make it habitable for the summer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may not, after all, fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the place and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow was between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of the recent thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the most crystalline purity, and the mountain simply exquisite in gradations of tint. I have a tenant in the house, one Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but can't pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather than of an active nature, and consequently excessively poor. He has a sign out "Attorney and Pension Agent," and writes and talks like one of the greatest of men. He was working the sewing machine when I was there, and talking of his share in the war, and why he didn't go to live in Boston, etc. (namely that he wasn't known), and my heart was heavy in my breast that so rich a nature, fitted to inhabit a tropical dreamland, should have nothing but that furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky without, to live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly lustrous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught but snow, for four months on end, is, it must be confessed, a rather lean diet for the human soul--deficient in variety, chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and medieval elements. I felt as I was returning home that some intellectual inferiority _ought_ to accrue to all populations whose environment for many months in the year consisted of pure snow.--You are better off, better off than you know, in that great black-earthed dunghill of an England. I say naught of politics, war, strikes, railroad accidents or public events, unless the departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a year in Europe be a public event.... Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of love to Harry, and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours ever, W. J. _To Carl Stumpf._ CAMBRIDGE, _6 Feb., 1887_. MY DEAR STUMPF,--Your two letters from Rügen of Sept. 8th, and from Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can assure you that their contents was most heartily appreciated, and not by me alone. I fairly squealed with pleasure over the first one and its rich combination of good counsel and humorous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend Royce, assistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed it almost as much as I. There is a heartiness and solidity about your letters which is truly German, and makes them as nutritious as they are refreshing to receive. Your _Kater-Gefühl_,[82] however, in your second letter, about your _Auslassungen_[83] on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its speedy evolution into _Auslassungen_ more animated still. I can well understand why Wundt should make his compatriots impatient. Foreigners can afford to be indifferent for he doesn't _crowd_ them so much. He aims at being a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in ruin. You remember what Victor Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables--"Il gênait Dieu"; Wundt only _gêners_ his _confrères_; and whilst they make mincemeat of some one of his views by their criticism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no _noeud vital_ in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can't kill him all at once. But surely you must admit that, since there must be professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species. He isn't a genius, he is a _professor_--a being whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about everything, connected with his _Fach_. Wundt has the most prodigious faculty of appropriating and preserving knowledge, and as for opinions, he takes _au grand sérieux_ his duties there. He says of each possible subject, "Here I must have an opinion. Let's see! What shall it be? How many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes! just four! Shall I take one of these? It will seem more original to take a higher position, a sort of _Vermittelungsansicht_[84] between them all. That I will do, etc., etc." So he acquires a complete assortment of opinions of his own; and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which they are! But this is not reprehensible; it is admirable--from the professorial point of view. To be sure, one gets tired of that point of view after a while. But was there ever, since Christian Wolff's time, such a model of the German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost fibre every gift that Heaven endowed him with at his birth, and made of it all that mortal pertinacity could make. He is the finished example of how much mere _education_ can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus as well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally more _amusing_ than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems to me incomparably his best book, because it is a more or less frank expression of the man's personal _ideal of living_--which has of course little to do with science, and which, in Spencer's case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt's "Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not "tackle" it for a good while to come. I was much entertained by your account of F----, of whom you have seen much more than I have. I am eager to see him, to hear about his visit to Halle, and to get his account of you. But [F.'s place of abode] and Boston are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he never comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with a good deal of independence of character; and if you knew the conditions of education in this country, and of the preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in colleges, you would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any other American's small amount of "Information über die philosophische Literatur." Times are mending, however, and within the past six or eight years it has been possible, in three or four of our colleges, to get really educated for philosophy as a profession. The most promising man we have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned Royce, a young Californian of thirty, who is really built for a metaphysician, and who is, besides that, a very complete human being, alive at every point. He wrote a novel last summer, which is now going through the press, and which I am very curious to see. He has just been in here, interrupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy of his book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you, promising to urge you to read it when you had time. The first half is ethical, and very readable and full of profound and witty details, but to my mind not of vast importance philosophically. The second half is a new argument for monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather lengthily expounded, but seeming to me to be one of the few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am _unable_ to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I can assure you that, if you come to close quarters with it, you will say its author belongs to the genuine philosophic breed. I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work, etc., but still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very slowly with private study and writing. However, few days without a line at least. I found to my surprise and pleasure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter on Space in "Mind," even though it should run through all four numbers of the year.[85] So I sent it to him. Most of it was written six or even seven years ago. To tell the truth, I am _off_ of Space now, and can probably carry my little private ingenuity concerning it no farther than I have already done in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend might put it into Helmholtz's mind to correct all his errors and tell the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it was high time that what I had written should see the light and not be lost. It is dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare to recommend it to you; but if you do read it, there is no one whose favorable opinion I should more rejoice to hear; for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on Space, the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject most _philosophically_. Of course, the experimental patience, and skill and freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes and Herings are altogether admirable, and perhaps at bottom _worth_ more than philosophic ability. Space is really a direfully difficult subject! The third dimension bothers me very much still. I have this very day corrected the proofs of an essay on the Perception of Time,[86] which I will send you when it shall appear in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" for October last. (The number of "July, 1886" is not yet out!) I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a chapter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which have been long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday it seemed to me that I could perhaps do nothing better than just translate 6 and 7 of the first _Abschnitt_ of your "Tonpsychologie," which is worth more than everything else put together which has been written on the subject. But I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I shall, however, borrow largely from you.... Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney's two bulky tomes, "Phantasms of the Living," an amazingly patient and thorough piece of work? I should not at all wonder if it were the beginning of a new department of natural history. But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics of _Völkerpsychologie_, and I think Gurney worthy of the highest praise for his devotion to this unfashionable work. He is not the kind of stuff which the ordinary pachydermatous fanatic and mystic is made of.... _To Henry P. Bowditch._ [Post-card] CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 26_ [1887]. My live-stock is increased by a _Töchterchen_, modest, tactful, unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact a really _epochmachendes Erzeugniss_.[87] I shall begin to save for her dowry and perhaps your Harold will marry her. Their ages are suitable. Grüsse an die gnädige Frau. W. J. _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 12, 1887_. MY DEAR HARRY,--...I got back yesterday from five days spent at my sylvan home at Lake Chocorua, whither I had gone to see about getting the buildings in order for the summer. The winter has been an exceptionally snowy one back of the coast, and I found, when I arrived, four feet of snow on a level and eight feet where it had drifted. The day before yesterday the heat became summer-like, and I took a long walk in my shirt-sleeves, going through the snow the whole length of my leg when the crust broke. It was a queer combination--not exactly agreeable. The snow-blanket keeps the ground from freezing deep; so that very few days after the snow is gone the soil is dry, and spring begins in good earnest. I tried snow-shoes but found them clumsy. They were making the maple-sugar in the woods; I had excellent comfort at the hotel hard by; with whose good landlord and still better landlady I am good friends; I rested off the fumes of my lore-crammed brain, and altogether I smile at the pride of Greece and Rome--from the height of my New Hampshire home. I'm afraid it will cost nearer $2000 than $800 to finish all the work. But we shall have ten large rooms (two of them 24 x 24), and three small ones--not counting kitchen, pantries, etc., and if you want some real, roomy, rustic happiness, you had better come over and spend all your summers with us. I can see that the thought makes you sick, so I'll say no more about it, but my permanent vision of your future is that your pen will fail you as a means of support, and, having laid up no income, you will return like the prodigal son to my roof. You will then find that, with a wood-pile as large as an ordinary house, a hearth four feet wide, and the American sun flooding the floor, even a New Hampshire winter is not so bad a thing. With house provided, two or three hundred dollars a year will support a man comfortably enough at Tamworth Iron Works, which is the name of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity makes you shudder.... College begins tomorrow, and there are seven weeks more of lectures. I never did my work so easily as this year, and hope to write two more chapters of psychology ere the vacation. That immortal work is now more than two thirds done. To you, who throw off two volumes a year, I must seem despicable for my slowness. But the truth is that (leaving other impediments out of account) the "science" is in such a confused and imperfect state that every paragraph presents some unforeseen snag, and I often spend many weeks on a point that I didn't foresee as a difficulty at all. American scholarship is looking up in that line. Three first-class works, in point both of originality and of learning, have appeared here within four months. Stanley Hall's and mine will make five. Meanwhile in England they are doing little or nothing. The "psychical researchers" seem to be the only active investigators.... _To his Sister._ CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 2, 1887_. DEAREST SISTER,--It is an unconscionable time since I have written either to you or to Harry. Too little eyesight, and too much use thereof, is the reason. I thought I should go wild during the examination period. I have now got some presbyopic spectacles and hope for an improvement. I think I've been straining my eyes for three or four months past by not having them on. A short dictated letter from you came the other day, and has been sent back to Alice in Cambridge, so I cannot give its date. I am grieved in the extreme to hear of another breakdown in your health.... But I make no sympathetic comment, as you would probably "roar" over it. There is this to be said, that it is probably less tragic to be sick all the time than to be sometimes well and incessantly tumbling down again. I thought of the difference in our lots yesterday as I was driving home in the evening with a wagon in tow, which I had started at six-thirty to get at a place called Fryeburg, 19 miles away. All day in the open air, talking with the country people, trying horses which they had to swap, but concluding to stick to my own--a most blessed feeling of freedom, and change from Cambridge life. I never knew before how much freedom came with having a horse of one's own. I am becoming quite an expert jockey, having examined and tried at least two dozen horses in the last six weeks; and I don't know a more fascinating occupation. The day before yesterday, I spent most of both forenoon and afternoon in the field under the blazing sun, sprinkling my potato plants with Paris green. The house comes on slowly, but in a fortnight we shall surely be inside of the larger half of it, and the rest can then drag on. Three or four men can't get ahead very fast. It has some delightful rooms, and, I have no doubt, will make us all happy for several years to come. Not for eternity, for everything fades, and I can see that some day we shall be glad to sell out and move on, to something grander, perhaps. For simple harmonious loveliness, however, this can't be beat.... What a grotesque sort of time you have been having with your Queen's jubilee! What a chance for a woman to give some human shove to things, by the smallest _real_ word or act, and what incapacity to guess its existence or to profit by it! One can see the ground for Bonaparte-worship, when one contemplates the results of the orthodox and conservative crowned-head education. He, at least, could have dropped an unconventional word, done something to pierce the cuticle. But the density of British unintellectuality is a spectacle for gods. One can't imagine it or describe it. One can only _see_ it.... W. J. * * * * * Such enterprises as the horse-swapping just alluded to were not always conducted with that circumspection which marks your true horse-trader. The companion of one search for a horse reported James as accosting a man whom he met driving along the road and asking, "Do you know anyone who wants to sell a horse?" At Chocorua everyone was willing to sell a horse, and accordingly the man answered that he "didn't know as he did," but what might James be ready to pay? James replied that he was looking for a horse "for about $150, but _might_ pay $175." There was a pause before the man spoke: "I've got a horse in my barn that would be just what you want--_for one hundred and seventy five_." The buyer was ready enough to laugh over such an incident; but he could not mend his trustful ways. The great thing was to have the fun of poking about the country-side and of talking business, or anything else, with its people whenever occasion offered; and, after all, the horses James bought usually turned out to be sound and serviceable enough. Perhaps it was because he looked at every living creature with a discriminating eye, and had not been a comparative anatomist for nothing. In the end, too, he was suited by any horse that pulled willingly and was safe for man, woman, and child to drive. There were no motor-cars then, and few other summer residents or visitors at Chocorua. James's two-seated "democrat" wagon, full of family and guests, and often followed by a child on the pony and by one or two other riders, used to travel quietly along the secluded and hilly roads for many hours a day. During this summer, and yearly during the next four, James found real rest and refreshment on his Chocorua farm. The conditions were simple and the place yielded him all the joys of proprietorship without involving him in responsibilities to cattle and fields. Anyone who knows central New Hampshire will realize how rudimentary "farming" in one of the most barren parts of rocky New England necessarily was. The glacial soil produced nothing naturally except woods and apple trees. But the country was very beautiful, and on his own acres James was lord of part of the Earth. Clearing away bushes and stones from one of the little fields near the house; causing something to be planted which, during those first years, always seemed as if it _must_ be responsive enough to grow; cutting out trees to improve the look of the woods or to open an interesting view; dragging stones out of the bathing-hole in the brook; buying a horse or two and a cow on some lonely roadside at the beginning of each summer--these were fascinating adventures. James was an insatiable lover of landscape, and particularly of wide "views." His inclination was to "open" the view, to cut down obstructing trees, even at the expense of the foreground. In drives and walks about Chocorua he usually made for some high hill that commanded the Ossipee Valley or the peaks of the Sandwich Range and White Mountains. Most hills in the neighborhood were topped by granite ledges and deserted pastures, and each commanded a different prospect. So the expedition often took the form of a picnic on one of these ledges. Axes were taken along; permission was sometimes obtained to cut down any worthless tree that had sprung up to shut off the horizon. Before the end of such an afternoon James was more than likely to have fallen in love with the spot and to be talking of buying it. Indeed he was forever playing with projects for buying this or that hill-top or high farm and establishing a new dwelling-place of some sort on it. He was usually restrained by the price or by remembering the housekeeping cares with which his wife was already over-burdened. But he actually did buy two--one near Chocorua and one on a shoulder of Mt. Hurricane in the Adirondacks; and about the Chocorua region there is hardly a high-perched pasture which he did not at some time nourish the hope of possessing. Another consideration that usually deterred him from buying was the difficulty of combining hill-tops with brooks. He used often to bewail this dispensation of nature; for a vacation without a brook or a pond to bathe in was as unthinkable as a summer dwelling-place that did not command a splendid view was "inferior." The little house at Chocorua stood at no great elevation, but it was near the Lake, and the place boasted its own brook, with a little pool, overhung by trees, into which the cold water splashed noisily over a natural dam. Thither, rain or shine, James used to walk across the meadow for an early morning dip; and after a walk or a drive or a couple of hours of chopping, or a warm half-day with a book in the woods, he used to plunge into it again. A few lines, through which breathes the happiest Chocorua mood, may be added here, although they were written during a later summer. _To Henry James._ CHOCORUA, _July 10_. ...I have been up here for ten days reveling in the deliciousness of the country, dressed in a single layer of flannel, shirt, breeches and long stockings, exercising my arms as well as my legs several hours a day, and already feeling that bodily and spiritual freshness that comes of health, and of which no other good on earth is worthy to unlatch the shoe.... * * * * * The next letter also rejoices over Chocorua, although it turns first to academic amenities. The correspondent addressed, now Sir Charles Walston, and Henry Jackson, both of the English Cambridge, had sent James two cases of audit ale. _To Charles Waldstein._ CAMBRIDGE, _July 20, 1887_. MY DEAR WALDSTEIN,--It never rains but it pours. The case of beer from _you_ also came duly. Day after day I wondered about its _provenance_, but your letter dispels the mystery. I had begun to believe that all the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford were going to vie with each other in wooing my appreciation of their respective brews. The dream is shattered but the reality remains. Five dozen is enough for me to fall back upon--in the immediate present, at all events. As for that unknown but thrice-blest Jackson, Henry Jackson of Trinity (_dulcissimum mundi nomen_)--is that the way he always acts, or is he only so towards _me_? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, and swear an eternal friendship with him. If ever he is in need of meat, drink, advice or defence, let him henceforth know to whom to apply--purse, house, life, all shall be at his disposal. Such a magnanimous heart as his was ne'er known before. I wish I knew his _Fach_! But my ignorance is too encyclopedic. He must be a very great philosopher. Goddard shall have some of the stuff.--Of course you mean George Goddard--I know him well. This has been written in the midst of interruptions. I am back in Cambridge for only a couple of days, to send furniture up to my New Hampshire farmlet. You may play the swell, but I play the yeoman. Which is the better and more godly life? Surely the latter. The mother earth is in my finger-nails and my back is aching and my skin sweating with the ache and sweat of Father Adam and all his _normal_ descendants. No matter! Swells and artists have their place too. Farewell! I am called off again by the furniture. Remember me! And as for the divine Henry Jackson, thank him again and again. His ale is royal stuff. I will make no comparisons between his and yours. Ever affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * In explanation of the next letters, it should be said that in 1888 it seemed advisable to get the children into a warmer winter climate than that of Cambridge. Accordingly Mrs. James carried the three ("Harry," "Billy," and "Margaret Mary," aged respectively eight, five, and two years), and a German governess off to Aiken, South Carolina, for three months. James was thus left in the Garden Street house with no other member of the family except--for he counted as one--a small pug-dog named Jap. Dr. Hildreth, who is referred to, was a next-door neighbor, whose children were somewhat older than the James children. _To his Son Henry (age 8)._ CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 1, 1888_. BELOVED HEINRICH,--You lazy old scoundrel, why don't you write a letter to your old Dad? Tell me how you enjoy your riding on horseback, what Billy does for a living, and which things you like best of all the new kinds of things you have to do with in Aiken. How do you like the darkeys being so numerous? Everything goes on quietly here. The house so still that you can hear a pin drop, and so clean that everything makes a mark on it. All because there are no brats and kids around. Jap is my only companion, and he sneezes all over me whenever I pick him up. Mrs. Hildreth and the children are gone to Florida. The Emmets seem very happy. I will close with a fable. A donkey felt badly because he was not so great a favorite as a lap-dog. He said, I must act like the lap-dog, and then my mistress will like me. So he came into the house and began to lick his mistress, and put his paws on her, and tried to get into her lap. Instead of kissing him for this, she screamed for the servants, who beat him and put him out of the house. Moral: It's no use to try to be anything but a donkey if you are one. But neither you nor Billy are one. Good-night! you blessed boy. Stick to your three R's and your riding, so as to get on _fast_. The ancient Persians only taught their boys to ride, to shoot the bow and to tell the truth. Good-night! Kiss your dear old Mammy and that belly-ache of a Billy, and little Margaret Mary for her Dad. Good-night. YOUR FATHER. _To his Son Henry._ CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 27_ [1888]. BELOVED HEINRICH,--Your long letter came yesterday P.M. Much the best you ever writ, and the address on the envelope so well written that I wondered whose hand it was, and never thought it might be yours. Your tooth also was a precious memorial--I hope you'll get a better one in its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out. They ought to go into the Peabody Museum. If any of George Washington's baby-teeth had been kept till now, they would be put somewhere in a public museum for the world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that, if you grow up to be a second Geo. Washington, I may sell it to a Museum. When Washington was only eight years old his mother didn't know he was going to be Washington. But he did be it, when the time came. I will now tell you about what Dr. Hildreth is doing. The family is in Florida, and he is building himself a new house. They are just starting the foundation. The fence is taken down between our yard and his, by the stable, and teams are driving through with lumber. Our back yard is filled with lumber for the frame of the house. It is to be cut, squared, mortised, etc., in our yard and then carried through to his. I dined last night at the Dibblees'. The boys had been to dancing-school. I like their looks. All the boys and girls together kept up such a talking that I seemed to be in a boiler factory where they bang the iron with the hammers so. It's just so with them every day. But they're very good-natured, even if they don't let the old ones speak. Say to Fräulein that "ich lasse Sie grüssen von Herzensgrund!"[88] Thump Bill for me and ask him if he likes it so nicely. Jap's nose is all dry and brown with holding it so everlastingly towards the fire. We are having ice-cream and the Rev. George A. Gordon to lunch today. The ice-cream is left over from the Philosophical Club last night. Now pray, old Harry, stick to your books and let me see you do sums and read _fast_ when you get back. The best of all of us is your mother, though. Good-bye! Your loving Dad. W. J. _To his Son William._ 18 GARDEN STREET, _Apr. 29, 1888_. 9:30 A.M. BELOVED WILLIAMSON,--This is Sunday, the sabbath of the Lord, and it has been very hot for two days. I think of you and Harry with such longing, and of that infant whom I know so little, that I cannot help writing you some words. Your Mammy writes me that she can't get _you_ to _work_ much, though Harry works. You _must_ work a little this summer in our own place. How nice it will be! I have wished that both you and Harry were by my side in some amusements which I have had lately. First, the learned seals in a big tank of water in Boston. The loveliest beasts, with big black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags. They play the guitar and banjo and organ, and one of them saves the life of a child who tumbles in the water, catching him by the collar with its teeth, and swimming him ashore. They are both, child and seal, trained to do it. When they have done well, their master gives them a lot of fish. They eat an awful lot, scales, and fins, and bones and all, without chewing. That is the worst thing about them. He says he never beats them. They are full of curiosity--more so than a dog for far-off things; for when a man went round the room with a pole pulling down the windows at the top, all their heads bobbed out of the water and followed him about with their eyes _aus lauter_[89] curiosity. Dogs would hardly have noticed him, I think. Now, speaking of dogs, Jap was _nauseated_ two days ago. I thought, from his licking his nose, that he was going to be sick, and got him out of doors just in time. He vomited most awfully on the grass. He then acted as if he thought I was going to punish him, poor thing. He can't discriminate between sickness and sin. He leads a dull life, without you and Margaret Mary. I tell him if it lasts much longer, he'll grow into a common beast; he hates to be a beast, but unless he has human companionship, he will sink to the level of one. So you must hasten back and make much of him. I also went to the panorama of the battle of Bunker Hill, which is as good as that of Gettysburg. I wished Harry had been there, because he knows the story of it. You and he shall go soon after your return. It makes you feel just as if you lived there. Well, I will now stop. On Monday morning the 14th or Sunday night the 13th of May, I will take you into my arms; that is, I will meet you with a carriage on the wharf, when the boat comes in. And I tell you I shall be glad to see the whole lot of you come roaring home. Give my love to your Mammy, to Aunt Margaret, to Fräulein, to Harry, to Margaret Mary, and to yourself. Your loving Dad, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ CHOCHURA, N.H., _July 11, 1888_. MY DEAR HARRY,--Your note announcing Edmund Gurney's death came yesterday, and was a most shocking surprise. It seems one of Death's stupidest strokes, for I know of no one whose life-task was begun on a more far-reaching scale, or from whom one expected with greater certainty richer fruit in the ripeness of time. I pity his lovely wife, to whom I wrote a note yesterday; and also a brief notice for the "Nation."[90] To me it will be a cruel loss; for he recognized me more than anyone, and in all my thoughts of returning to England he was the Englishman from whom I awaited the most nourishing communion. We ran along on very similar lines of interest. He was very profound, subtle, and voluminous, and bound for an intellectual synthesis of things much solider and completer than anyone I know, except perhaps Royce. Well! such is life! all these deaths make what remains here seem strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.[91] I have to thank you for a previous letter three or four weeks old, which, having sent to Aunt Kate, I cannot now date. I must also thank for "Partial Portraits" and "The Reverberator." The former, I of course knew (except the peculiarly happy Woolson one), but have read several of 'em again with keen pleasure, especially the Turguenieff. "The Reverberator" is masterly and exquisite. I quite squealed through it, and all the household has amazingly enjoyed it. It shows the technical ease you have attained, that you can handle so delicate and difficult a fancy so lightly. It is simply delicious. I hope your other magazine things, which I am following your advice and not reading [in magazine form], are only half as good. How you can keep up such a productivity and live, I don't see. All your time is your own, however, barring dinner-parties, and that makes a great difference. Most of my time seems to disappear in college duties, not to speak of domestic interruptions. Our summer starts promisingly. How with my lazy temperament I managed to start all the things we put through last summer, now makes me wonder. The place has yet a good deal to be done with it, but it can be taken slowly, and Alice is a most _vaillante_ partner. We have a trump of a hired man.... Some day I'll send you a photograph of the little place. Please send this to Alice, for whose letters I'm duly grateful. I only hope she'll keep decently well for a little while. Yours ever, W. J. P.S. I have just been downstairs to get an envelope, and there on the lawn saw a part of the family which I will describe, for you to insert in one of your novels as a picture of domestic happiness. On the newly made lawn in the angle of the house and kitchen ell, in the shadow of the hot afternoon sun, lies a mattress taken out of our spare-room for an airing against Richard Hodgson's arrival tomorrow. On it the madonna and child--the former sewing in a nice blue point dress, and smiling at the latter (named Peggy), immensely big and fat for her years, and who, with quite a vocabulary of adjectives, proper names, and a mouthful of teeth, shows as yet, although in her sixteenth month, no disposition to walk. She is rolling and prattling to herself, now on mattress and now on grass, and is an exceedingly good-natured, happy, and intelligent child. It conduces to her happiness to have a hard cracker in her fist, at which she mumbles more or less all day, and of which she is never known to let go, even taking it into her bath with her and holding it immersed till that ceremony is o'er. A man is papering and painting one of our parlors, a carpenter putting up a mantelpiece in another. Margaret and Harry's tutor are off on the backs of the two horses to the village seven miles off, to have 'em shod. I, with naught on but gray flannel shirt, breeches, belt, stockings and shoes, shall now proceed across the Lake in the boat and up the hill, to get and carry the mail. Harry will probably ride along the shore on the pony which Aunt Kate has given him, and where Billy and Fräulein are, Heaven only knows. Returning, I shall have a bath either in lake or brook--doesn't it sound nice? On the whole it is nice, but very hot. _To Miss Grace Norton._ [Post-card] [CHOCORUA,] _Aug. 12, 1888_. It would take G[uy] de M[aupassant] himself to just fill a post-card chock-full and yet leave naught to be desired, with an account of "Pierre et Jean." It is a little cube of bronze; or like the body of the Capitaine Beausire, "plein comme un oeuf, dur comme une balle"--dur surtout! Fifteen years ago, I might have been _enthused_ by such art; but I'm growing weak-minded, and the charm of this admirable precision and adequacy of art to subject leaves me too cold. It is like these modern tools and instruments, so admirably compact, and strong, and reduced to their fighting weight. One of those little metallic pumps, _e.g._, so oily and powerful, with a handle about two feet long, which will throw a column of water about four inches thick 100 feet. Unfortunately, G. de M.'s pump only throws dirty water--and I am _beginning_ to be old fogy eno' to like even an old shackly wooden pump-handle, if the water it fetches only carries all the sweetness of the mountain-side. Yrs. ever, W.J. The dying fish on p[in]s stick most in my memory. Is that right in a novel of human life? _To G. Croom Robertson._ _Oct. 7, 1888._ ...I am teaching ethics and the philosophy of religion for the first time, with that dear old duffer Martineau's works as a text. It gives me lots to do, as I only began my systematic reading in that line three weeks ago, having wasted the summer in farming (if such it can be called) and philosophizing. My "Psychology" will therefore have to be postponed until another year; for with as much college work as I have this year, I can't expect to write a line of it.... _To Henry James._ _Oct. 14, 1888._ ...The Cambridge year begins with much vehemence--I with a big class in ethics, and seven graduates from other colleges in advanced psychology, giving me a good deal of work. But I feel uncommonly hearty, and shall no doubt come out of it all in good shape.... I am to have lots of reading and no writing to speak of this year and expect to enjoy it hugely. It does one good to read classic books. For a month past I've done nothing else, in behalf of my ethics class--Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Butler, Paley, Spinoza, etc., etc. No book is celebrated without deserving it for some quality, and recenter books, certain never to be celebrated, have an awfully squashy texture.... _To E. L. Godkin._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 15, 1889_. MY DEAR GODKIN,--Harry's address is 34 De Vere Gardens, W. I imagine that he will be there till midsummer. I hope 'tis yourself that's going! You must need it awfully. I fully meant to call on you when I was in N. Y. a fortnight ago. But I was so dead tired that I slept on my hotel bed all the only afternoon I had, went to Daly's theatre in the evening and then had to come away. You are the noblest Roman of them all; and what a man shall do for a newspaper with sanity, intellect and backbone in it, when your editorial pen has ceased to trickle, I don't know. There must be plenty of morals in the world, plenty of brains, plenty of education, plenty of literary skill, but was there ever a time or country when they seemed less to coalesce, in the field of journalism? In the earlier years I may say that my whole political education was due to the "Nation"; later came a time when I thought you looked on the doings of Terence Powderly and Co. too much from without and too little from within; now I turn to you again as my only solace in a world where nothing stands straight. You have the most curious way of always being _right_, so I never dare to trust myself now when you're agin me. I read my "Nation" rather quicker than I used, but I depend on it perhaps more than ever, and cannot forbear seizing this passing occasion to tell you so. I hope, once more, that you're going abroad yourself. It will do you no end of good to _take in_ after your daily giving out for so long. Harry will be delighted to see you. Poor Alice is stranded at Leamington, unable to use her legs or brain to any account, but never complaining, and living apparently on the Irish question, being a violent Parnellite. I settle the affairs of the Universe in my College courses, and have got so far ahead as to be building a big new house on that part of it known as the Norton estate.[92] A new street passes before your old house, now Grace Norton's. I am a little north of it, facing it, and squatting right across the old Norton Avenue. Four other houses are going up there immediately, two of 'em actually under way. No answer to this is expected, from a man as busy as you. Please give my best respects to Mrs. Godkin, and believe me ever affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 12, 1889_. MY DEAR HARRY,--I have been feeling so dead-tired all this spring that I believe a long break from my usual scenes is necessary. It is like the fagged state that drove me abroad the last two times. I have been pretty steadily busy for six years and the result isn't wonderful, considering what a miserable nervous system I have anyhow. The upshot of it is that I have pretty much made up my mind to invest $1000 (if necessary) of Aunt Kate's legacy in my constitution, and spend the summer abroad. This will give me the long-wished opportunity of seeing you and Alice, and enable me to go to an international congress of "physiological psychologists" which I have had the honor of an invitation to attend in the capacity of "honorary committee"-man for the U. S. It will be instructive and inspiring, no doubt, and won't last long, and [will] give me an opportunity to meet a number of eminent men. But for these three reasons, I think I should start for the Pacific coast as being more novel. I confess I find myself caring more for landscapes than for men--strange to say, and doubtless shameful; so my stay in London will probably be short. I learn from Godkin that he is to be with you about the same time that I shall be in London. I don't suppose you have room for both of us, but pray don't let that trouble you. I can easily find a lodging somewhere for a few days, which are all that I shall stay. I am heartily glad Godkin is about to go abroad; I know of no one who so richly deserves a vacation. My heart is warming up again to the "Nation," as it hasn't for many years. I long to have a good long talk with you about yourself, Alice, and 10,000 old things. Alice used to be so perturbed at _expecting_ things that in my ignorance of her present condition I don't venture to announce to her my arrival. But do you use your discretion as to where and how she shall be informed. Send her this, if it is the best way. It's a bad summer for me to be gone, with the house-building here, the Chocorua place unfinished, and the crowds set in motion by the Paris exhibition; and _perhaps_, if I find myself unexpectedly hearty when lectures end two weeks hence, I may not go after all. But I can't help feeling in my bones that I _ought_ to go, so I probably shall. It will then be the Cephalonia, sailing June 22, and I shall get off at Queenstown, as I am on the whole more curious to see the Emerald Isle than any other part of Europe, except Scotland, which I probably shan't see at all. The "Congress" in Paris begins Aug. 5. How good it will be to see poor Alice again, and to hear you discourse! Ever affectly, yours, W.J. * * * * * In late June James did, in fact, sail on the Cephalonia and disembark at Queenstown. Thence he proceeded _via_ Cork to Killarney and on to Dublin, where he spent a day at Trinity College before going to Glasgow and Oban. Having, in the briefest time and at first sight, fallen "dead in love wi' Scotland both land and people" he traveled on _via_ Edinburgh, and reached London by the 17th of July. There he stayed with Henry James for ten days and saw his sister. A letter from London to Mrs. James may be included in part. _To Mrs. James._ 34 DE VERE GARDENS, LONDON, _July 29, 1889_. ... [After seeing Mrs. Gurney I went] to Brighton, where I spent a night at Myers's lodgings, and the evening with him and the Sidgwicks trying thought-transference experiments which, however, on that occasion did not succeed.... The best thing by far which I saw in Brighton, and a thing the impression of which will perhaps outlast everything else on this trip, was four cuttle-fish (octopus) in the Aquarium. I wish we had one of them for a child--such flexible intensity of life in a form so inaccessible to our sympathy. Next day to Haslemere to the Pearsall Smiths, where I spent a really _gemüthlich_ evening and morning. Pearsall himself as engaging as of yore. The place and country wonderfully rich and beautiful. Returning yesterday, went with H. to National Gallery in the afternoon, and read Brownell on France in the P.M. Yesterday, Sunday, Harry went to the country after breakfast, whilst I wrote a lot of notes and read Zola's "Germinal," a story of mines and miners, and a truly magnificent work, if successfully to reproduce the horror and pity of certain human facts and make you see them as if real can make a book magnificent. Towards four o'clock (the weather fine) I mounted the top of a bus and went (with thousands of others similarly enthroned) to Hampton Court, through Kew, Richmond, Bushey Park, etc.; about 30 miles there and back, all for 4_s._ 6_d._ I strolled for an hour or more in the Hampton Court Gardens, and overlooked the Thames all _bizarrée_ with row-boats and male and female rowers, and got back, _perdu dans la foule_, at 10 P.M.--a most delightful and interesting six hours, with but the usual drawback, that _you_ were not along. How you would have enjoyed every bit of it, especially the glimpses, between Richmond and Hampton, over the high brick walls and between the bars of the iron gates, of these extraordinary English gardens and larger grounds, all black with their tufted vegetation. More different things can grow in a square foot here, if they're taken care of, than I've ever seen elsewhere, and one of these high ivy-walled gardens is something the _like_ of which is altogether unknown to us. Like all human things (except wives) they grow banal enough, if one stays long in their company, but the first acquaintance between Alice Gibbens and them is something which I would fain see. The crowd was immense and the picturesqueness of everything quite medieval, as were also the good manners and the tendency to a certain hearty sociability, shown in the chaffing from vehicle to vehicle along the road. I'm glad I had this sight of the greatness of the English people, and glad I had no social duties to perform.... Harry is as nice and simple and amiable as he can be. He has covered himself, like some marine crustacean, with all sorts of material growths, rich sea-weeds and rigid barnacles and things, and lives hidden in the midst of his strange heavy alien manners and customs; but these are all but "protective resemblances," under which the same dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Harry remains, caring for little but his writing, and full of dutifulness and affection for all gentle things.... * * * * * From London James crossed to Paris, to attend the International Congress of Physiological Psychology which had been arranged to coincide with the International Exposition of that year. He found between 60 and 120 colleagues, most of them European, of course, in attendance at its sessions. This incident in his life may be summarized in a few sentences from his own report of the Congress, in "Mind": "The most striking feature of the discussions was, perhaps, their tendency to slope off to some one or other of those shady horizons with which the name of "psychic-research" is now associated.... The open results were, however (as always happens at such gatherings), secondary in real importance to the latent ones--the friendships made, the intimacies deepened, and the encouragement and inspiration which came to everyone from seeing before them in flesh and blood so large a portion of that little army of fellow students from whom and for whom all contemporary psychology exists. The individual worker feels much less isolated in the world after such an experience." To Stumpf he wrote similarly (Aug. 15): "The sight of 120 men all actively interested in psychology has made me feel much less lonely in the world, and ready to finish my book this year with a great deal more _entrain_. A book hanging so long on one's hands at last gets outgrown, and even disgusting to one." On his way home James went again to see his sister, and her account of him is not to be omitted. "William, instead of going to Switzerland, came suddenly back from Paris and went home, having, as usual, exhausted Europe in a few weeks, finding it stale, flat and unprofitable. The only necessity being to get home, the first letter after his arrival, was, of course, full of plans for his return _plus_ wife and infants; he is just like a blob of mercury--you can't put a mental finger upon him. H. and I were laughing over him, and recalling Father, and William's resemblance (in his ways) to him. Tho' the results are the same, they seem to come from such a different nature in the two; in W., an entire inability or indifference to 'stick to a thing for the sake of sticking,' as some one said of him once; whilst Father, the delicious infant! couldn't submit even to the thralldom of his own whim; and then the dear being was such a prey to the demon homesickness.... But to return to our mutton, William: he came with H. on August 14 on his way to Liverpool. He told all about his Paris experience, where he was a delegate to the Psychological Congress, which was a most brilliant success. The French most polite and hospitable. They invited W. to open the Congress, and they always had a foreigner in the Chair at the different meetings. I extracted with great difficulty from him that 'Monsieur Willyam James' was frequently referred to by the speakers. He liked the Henry Sidgwicks and Fred. Myers. Mrs. Myers paid him the following enigmatic compliment: 'We are so glad that you are _as_ you are.'" * * * * * [Illustration: Francis James Child. Caricature from a Pocket Note-Book.] On getting back to Cambridge in the autumn, James moved his family into a house which he had just built in Irving Street--a street which had been newly opened through what used to be called Norton's Woods. He had planned this house with such eager interest in all its details that he had even designed doors and windows and had practically been his own architect with respect to everything except structural specifications. The result was a detached wooden house of pleasantly square outer appearance, covered with shingles which soon weathered brown, and having dark green trimmings. Inside there was one room which deserves particular mention. James loved to have "space" about him[93] and he planned a library that was the largest and sunniest room the house could provide. It was about 22-1/2 feet wide and 27 feet long. The walls were lined with book-shelves from floor to ceiling, except where James hung a portrait of his father over the open fireplace. On the southern side there was a triple window whose total width was nearly half the length of the room, and which let in a flood of sunlight. Through it one looked out upon a small lawn overhung by a large elm, and upon more grass and trees beyond. This was his study and living-room for the rest of his life. Here most of the Cambridge letters that follow may be assumed to have been written. * * * * * After James moved to 95 Irving Street, several people referred to in the letters became his very near neighbors. Josiah Royce, Francis J. Child, C. E. Norton, Miss Theodora Sedgwick were all within three minutes walk of his door. Miss Grace Norton lived across the way. _To Miss Grace Norton._ CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 25, 1889_. DEAR MISS NORTON,--Will you accept, as a Christmas offering, the accompanying bottles of California Champagne, _extremely_ salubrious in its after-effects, quite as intoxicating, almost as good-tasting and only half as "cost-playful" as French Champagne--in short, a beverage which no household should be without. I should gladly have sought out something more sentimental,--though after a bottle or so, this seems rosy with sentiment,--but I have no gifts of invention in the _present_ line, and took something useful, merely to testify to the affection and admiration with which I am ever yours, WM. JAMES. _To Charles Eliot Norton._ Undated [1889]. MY DEAR MR. NORTON,--This introduces to you Mr. X----, from South Abington, a workman in a tack factory since boyhood, who has nevertheless gone quite deeply into studies philosophic, mathematical and sociological. He will tell you more about himself, and I wish if convenient that you would "draw him out"--I should like much to hear your impression. I want, if possible, to help him to a start in life here. Palmer has invited him to stay with him for a week. And we are busy studying him and trying to cast his horoscope, to feel whether we can conscientiously recommend him to some millionaire to support in college for a year (as unmatriculated), and so give him a chance to make himself known and find some better avocation for himself than the making of tacks ten hours a day. He knows nothing of our plan, thinks this a mere spree, so please don't let it out! Very truly yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The workman from the tack factory, like more than one other lame duck before and after him, had aroused what Professor Palmer once aptly called James's "inclination toward the under-dog and his insistence on keeping the door open for every species of human experiment." It made no difference what X----'s doctrines were, or whether or not they were akin to James's way of thinking. And if such a man was unfitted to arouse other people's sympathies, James's own were the more readily challenged. The erratics of the philosophical world were significant phenomena, and sometimes interested him most just when they were most "queer"--when they were perhaps aberrant to the point of being pathological specimens. It mattered as little to James where such people sprang from, or by what strange processes they had arrived at their ideas, as it matters to a naturalist that beetles have to be hunted for in all sorts of places. He filled the "Varieties of Religious Experience" with the records of abnormal cases and with accounts of the mental and emotional adventures of people whom the everyday world called cranks and fanatics. He was not only curious about such men, but endlessly patient and helpful to them. To some indeed his encouragement was more comforting than profitable, and among them must be numbered the X---- of this letter--an uncouth and helpless creature, who has since achieved his only immortality in another sphere of being. The poor man never got over this "spree," but withdrew from the tack factory forever, spent many years in a Mills Hotel working over an unsalable _magnum opus_, and every now and then appealing for funds. A letter on a later page recurs to this case. * * * * * In the spring of 1890 James finished the remaining chapters of the "Psychology." The next letters were written during the final weeks of work on the book. _To Henry Holt._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1890_. MY DEAR HOLT,--I was in hopes that you would propose to break away from the famous "Series" and publish the book independently, in two volumes. An abridgement could then be prepared for the Series. If there be anything which I loathe it is a mean overgrown page in small type, and I think the author's feelings ought to go for a good deal in the case of the enormous _rat_ which his ten years gestation has brought forth. In any event, I dread the summer and next year, with two new courses to teach, and, I fear, no vacation. What I wrote you, if you remember, was to send you the "heft" of the MS. by May 1st, the rest to be done in the intervals of proof-correcting. You however insisted on having the entire MS. in your hands before anything should be done. It seems to me that this delay is, _now_ at any rate, absurd. There is certainly less than two weeks' work on the MS. undone. And every day got behind us now means a day of travel and vacation for me next September. I really think, considering the sort of risk I am running by the delay, that I must _insist_ on getting to press now as soon as the page is decided on. No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. _No_ subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages! Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing--a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: _1st_, that there is no such thing as a _science_ of psychology, and _2nd_, that W. J. is an incapable. Yours provided you hurry up things, WM. JAMES. * * * * * When Mrs. James took the children to Chocorua for the summer, James remained in Cambridge to finish the book. _To Mrs. James._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 17_, 7:50 P.M. ...Wrote hard pretty much all day, lectured on Ansel Bourne, etc., had three students to lunch, Chubb being gone to Milton. Visit this A.M. from Bishop Keane of the New Catholic University at Washington, to get advice about psycho-physic laboratory. Feel very well, though I drink coffee daily. "Psychology" will certainly be finished by Sunday noon!... * * * * * _Sunday, May_ [18], 9:50 P.M. ...The job is done! All but some paging and half a dozen little footnotes, the work is completed, and as I see it as a unit, I feel as if it might be rather a vigorous and richly colored chunk--for that kind of thing at least!... * * * * * _May 22_, 5:45 P.M. ...I sot up till two last night putting the finishing touches on the MS., which now goes to Holt in irreproachable shape, woodcuts and all. I insured it for $1000.00 in giving it to the express people this A.M. That will make them extra careful at a cost of $1.50. This morning a great feeling of weariness came over me at 10 o'clock, and I was taking down a volume of Tennyson intending to doze off in my chair, when X---- arrived.... * * * * * _May 24._ ...I came home very weary, and lit a fire, and had a delicious two hours all by myself, thinking of the big _étape_ of my life which now lay behind me (I mean that infernal book done), and of the possibilities that the future yielded of reading and living and loving out from the shadow of that interminable black cloud.... At any rate, it does give me some comfort to think that I don't live _wholly_ in projects, aspirations and phrases, but now and then have something done to show for all the fuss. The joke of it is that I, who have always considered myself a thing of glimpses, of discontinuity, of _aperçus_, with no power of doing a big job, suddenly realize at the _end_ of this task that it is the biggest book on psychology in any language except Wundt's, Rosmini's and Daniel Greenleaf Thompson's! Still, if it burns up at the printing-office, I shan't much care, for I shan't ever write it again!! _To Henry James._ CHOCORUA, _June 4, 1890_. MY DEAR HARRY, ...The great event for me is the completion at last of my tedious book. I have been at my desk with it every day since I got back from Europe, and up at four in the morning with it for many a day of the last month. I have written every page four or five times over, and carried it "on my mind" for nine years past, so you may imagine the relief. Besides, I am glad to appear at last as a man who has done something more than make phrases and projects. I will send you a copy, in the fall, I trust, though [the printer] is so inert about starting the proofs that we may not get through till midwinter or later. As "Psychologies" go, it is a good one, but psychology is in such an ante-scientific condition that the whole present generation of them is predestined to become unreadable old medieval lumber, as soon as the first genuine tracks of insight are made. The sooner the better, for me!... _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ CAMBRIDGE, _July 24, 1890_. MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--How good a way to begin the day, with a letter from you, and a composition of yours to correct! To take the latter first, I trembled a little when, after looking over the printed document, I found you beginning so sympathetically to stroke down Mr. Jay; but you made it all right ere the end. Since the movement is on foot, it is time that rational people like yourself should get an influence in it. I doubt whether the earth supports a more genuine enemy of all that the Catholic Church _inwardly_ stands for than I do--_écrasez l'infâme_ is the only way I can feel about it. But the concrete Catholics, including the common priests in this country, are an entirely different matter. Their wish to educate their own, and to do what proselytizing they can, is natural enough; so is their wish to get state money. "Destroying American institutions" is a widely different matter; and instead of this vague phrase, I should like to hear one specification laid down of an "institution" which they are now threatening. The only way to resist them is absolute firmness and impartiality, and continuing in the line which you point out, bless your 'art! Down with demagogism!--this document is not quite free therefrom.... As for the style, I see in it nothing but what is admirable. A pedant might object (near the end) to a _drop_ of (even Huguenot) blood _beating high_; but how can I object to anything from your pen? And now 10,000 thanks for your kind words about the proofs. The pages I sent you are probably the most _continuously_ amusing in the book--though occasionally there is a passing gleam elsewhere. If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more. I take you at your word and send you some more sheets--only, to get something pithy and real, I go back to some practical remarks at the end of a chapter on Habit, composed with a view of benefiting the _young_. May they accordingly be an inspiration to _you_! Most of the book is altogether unreadable from any human point of view, as I feel only too well in my deluge of proofs. My dear wife will come down next week (I think) to help me through. Thank you once more, and believe me, with warm regards to your husband, Yours always, WM. JAMES. _To W. D. Howells._ CHOCORUA, _Aug. 20, 1890_. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You've done it this time and no mistake! I've had a little leisure for reading this summer, and have just read, first your "Shadow of a Dream," and next your "Hazard of New Fortunes," and can hardly recollect a novel that has taken hold of me like the latter. Some compensations go with being a mature man, do they not? You couldn't possibly have done so solid a piece of work as that ten years ago, could you? The steady unflagging flow of it is something wonderful. Never a weak note, the number of characters, each intensely individual, the observation of detail, the everlasting wit and humor, and beneath all the bass accompaniment of the human problem, the entire Americanness of it, all make it a very great book, and one which will last when we shall have melted into the infinite azure. Ah! my dear Howells, it's worth something to be able to write such a book, and it is so peculiarly _yours_ too, flavored with your idiosyncrasy. (The book is so d--d humane!) Congratulate your wife on having brought up such a husband. _My_ wife had been raving about it ever since it came out, but I couldn't read it till I got the larger printed copy, and naturally couldn't credit all she said. But it makes one love as well as admire you, and so o'er-shadows the equally exquisite, though slighter "Shadow of a Dream," that I have no adjectives left for that. I hope the summer is speeding well with all of you. I have been in Cambridge six weeks and corrected 1400 pages of proof. The year which shall have witnessed the apparition of your "Hazard of New Fortunes," of Harry's "Tragic Muse," and of _my_ "Psychology" will indeed be a memorable one in American Literature!! Believe me, with warm regards to Mrs. Howells, yours ever affectionately, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The "Principles of Psychology" appeared in the early autumn. X 1890-1893 _The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A Sabbatical Year in Europe_ THE publication of the "Principles" may be treated as making a date--at any rate in the story of James's life. Although conceived originally as a manual or textbook, it had gone far beyond that mere summary of a subject which it is the rôle of most textbooks to be, and had finally assumed the form of a philosophic survey. "It was a declaration of independence (defining the boundary lines of a new science with unapproachable genius.)"[94] In the scientific world it established James's already high reputation and greatly extended his influence. Beyond scientific circles the book's style, its colloquial directness, its humor, and its moral depth and appeal, won it an instantaneous popularity. Even before it appeared, the compositor at the printing-press was reported as so enthralled by his "copy" that he was reading the manuscript out of hours. Passages, among which the chapter on Habit is the most widely known, "went home" with the force of eloquent sermons. "I can't tell you what the book has _meant_ to me." Such was the burden of countless messages that began to come in from non-professional readers. During the course of the first winter after its appearance, it became clear that the only obstacle to its almost universal use in American colleges was its size. And so James spent the summer of 1891 in making an abridgment which appeared that autumn under the title "Briefer Course." In one form or the other, either in the two-volume edition or the one-volume abridgment,--either in "James" or in "Jimmy," as the two books were soon nicknamed,--James's "Psychology" was soon in use in most of the colleges. During the thirty years that have passed since then, the majority of the English-speaking students who have entered the field of psychology have entered by the door which James's pages threw wide to them. But by this time the inclination of James's own mind was more and more strongly toward philosophy, and the experimental laboratory was becoming a burden to him. It is true that the laboratory with which he had thus far done his own work would not nowadays be reckoned as at all a big affair. But owing to advances which had been made in the science during the previous ten years, an enlarged laboratory was a necessity for further progress and for right teaching. It would then require more time and attention from its director; James wished to give less time than heretofore. "I naturally hate experimental work," he said, "and all my circumstances conspired (during the important years of my life) to prevent me from getting into a routine of it, so that now it is always the duty that gets postponed. There are plenty of others, to keep my time as fully employed as my working powers permit."[95] There appeared to be one solution for the difficulty, and in 1892 he set about to arrange it. He raised enough money to establish the Harvard Laboratory on such a basis that an able experimenter could be invited to make its direction his chief concern. He recommended the appointment of Hugo Münsterberg to take charge for three years. He had been much impressed by the originality and promise implied by some experimental work which Münsterberg had already done at Freiburg, and his conviction--in respect to all academic appointments--was that youth and originality should be sought rather than "safety"; that the way to organize a strong philosophical department was to get men of different schools into its faculty, and that they should expound dissimilar rather than harmonious points of view and doctrines. When this appointment had been made, James saw his way clear to taking the sabbatical year of absence from college duties to which he was already more than entitled. For nine years he had allowed himself only the briefest interruptions of work, and by 1892 he was in a badly fatigued condition. He sailed for Antwerp in May, and took his family with him. He had no more definite purpose than to escape all literary and academic obligations and "lie fallow" in Europe for the next fifteen months. Letters will show that he accomplished this with fair success. * * * * * Meanwhile, those which immediately follow were written from Cambridge. The first of them was to a Boston neighbor and correspondent, one letter to whom has already been given and to whom there will be a number more. Sarah Whitman, who had lived in Baltimore before her marriage to Henry Whitman of Boston made her a resident of that city and of Beverly, was a person to whose charm and talents and taste it would be impossible to do justice here. She was a lover of every art, and worked, herself, at painting, and with more success and great distinction in stained glass. Eager and generous of spirit, she was constantly confided in and consulted by a small host of friends. She was, in an eminent degree, one of those happy mortals who possess a native gift for friendship and hospitality. At the date of the next letter she was, for a season, in England. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ CAMBRIDGE, _Oct. 15, 1890_. MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--It does me good to hear from you, and to come in contact with the spirit with which you "chuck" yourself at life. It is medicinal in a way which it would probably both surprise and please you to know, and helps to make me ashamed of those pusillanimities and self-contempts which are the bane of my temperament and against which I have to carry on my lifelong struggle. Enough! As for you, beat Sargent, play round Chamberlain, extract the goodness and wisdom of Bryce, absorb the autumn colors of the land and sea, mix the crimson and the opal fire in the glass, charm everyone you come in contact with by your humanity and amiability; in short, _continue_, and we shall have plenty to talk about at the next (but for that, tedious) dinner at which it may be my blessing to be placed by your side! Also enough! You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart [Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am reading with great delight his book. How delicious is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut and dried heads of classification. Stanley is a genius all to himself, and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescribable mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and democratic feeling, callousness to others' insides, yet kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures. As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You have a genius to cope with it.--But again, enough! Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words you let fall about the "Psychology." Go on! But remember that you can do so just as well without reading it: I shan't know the difference. Seriously, your determination to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise noble nature. I wish that I had never written it. I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid town. Good-night! Yours faithfully, WM. JAMES. * * * * * James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edition of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the next year as the "Briefer Course." Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles,"[96] and had expressed a hope that such passages would be omitted from the Briefer Course. _To G. H. Howison._ CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 20, 1891_. MY POOR DEAR DARLING HOWISON,--Your letter is received and wrings my heart with its friendliness and animosity combined. But don't think me more frivolous than I am. "Those bagatelle diatribes about Hegelism," etc., are not reprinted in this book, not a single syllable of them! I make some jokes about Caird on a certain page, but Caird already forgives me, and writes that I am sophisticated by Hegel myself. If you carefully ponder the _note_ on that same page or the next one (Volume I, page 370), you will see the real inwardness of my whole feeling about the matter. I am not as low as I seem, and some day (D. v.) may get out another and a more "metaphysical" book, which will steal all your Hegelian thunder except the dialectical method, and show me to be a true child of the gospel. Heartily and everlastingly yours, WM. JAMES. _To F. W. H. Myers._ NEWPORT, R.I., _Jan. 30, 1891_. MY DEAR MYERS,--Your letter of the 12th came duly, but not till now have I had leisure to write you a line of reply. Verily you are the stuff of which world-changers are made! What a despot for Psychical Research! I always feel guilty in your presence, and am, on the whole, glad that the broad blue ocean rolls between us for most of the days of the year; although I should be glad to have it intermit occasionally, on days when I feel particularly larky and indifferent, when I might meet you without being bowed down with shame. To speak seriously, however, I agree in what you say, that the position I am now in (Professorship, book published and all) does give me a very good pedestal for carrying on psychical research effectively, or rather for disseminating its results effectively. I find however that _narratives_ are a weariness, and I must confess that the reading of narratives for which I have no personal responsibility is almost intolerable to me. Those that come to me at first-hand, incidentally to the Census, I get interested in. Others much less so; and I imagine my case is a very common case. One page of experimental thought-transference work will "carry" more than a hundred of "Phantasms of the Living." I shall stick to my share of the latter, however; and expect in the summer recess to work up the results already gained in an article[97] for "Scribner's Magazine," which will be the basis for more publicity and advertising and bring in another bundle of Schedules to report on at the Congress. Of course I wholly agree with you in regard to the _ultimate_ future of the business, and fame will be the portion of him who may succeed in naturalizing it as a branch of legitimate science. I think it quite on the cards that you, with your singular tenacity of purpose, and wide look at all the intellectual relations of the thing, may live to be the ultra-Darwin yourself. Only the facts are _so_ discontinuous so far that possibly all our generation can do may be to get 'em called facts. I'm a bad fellow to investigate on account of my bad memory for anecdotes and other disjointed details. Teaching of students will have to fill most of my time, I foresee; but of course my weather eye will remain open upon the occult world. Our "Branch," you see, has tided over its difficulties temporarily; and by raising its fee will enter upon the new year with a certain momentum. You'll have to bleed, though, ere the end, devoted creatures that you are, over there! I thank you most heartily for your kind words about my book, and am touched by your faithful eye to the errata. The volumes were run through the press in less than seven weeks, and the proof-reading suffered. My friend G. Stanley Hall, leader of American Psychology, has written that the book is the most complete piece of self-evisceration since Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Don't you think that's rather unkind? But in this age of nerves all philosophizing is really something of that sort. I finished yesterday the writing of an address on Ethics which I have to give at Yale College; and, on the way hither in the cars, I read the last half of Rudyard Kipling's "The Light that Failed"--finding the latter indecently true to nature, but recognizing after all that my ethics and his novel were the same sort of thing. All literary men are sacrifices. "Les festins humains qu'ils servent à leurs fêtes ressemblent la plupart à ceux des pélicans," etc., etc. Enough!... _To W. D. Howells._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 12, 1891_. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You made me what seemed at the time a most reckless invitation at the Childs' one day--you probably remember it. It seemed to me improper then to take it up. But it has lain rankling in my mind ever since; and now, as the spring weather makes a young man's fancy lightly turn away from the metaphysical husks on which he has fed exclusively all winter to some more human reading, I say to myself, Why shouldn't I have copies, from the Author himself, of "Silas Lapham" and of the "Minister's Charge"--which by this time are almost the only things of yours which I have never possessed? Take this as thou wilt!... _To W. D. Howells._ CAMBRIDGE, _June 12, 1891_. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You are a sublime and immortal genius! I have just read "Silas Lapham" and "Lemuel Barker"--strange that I should not have read them before, after hearing my wife rave about them so--and of all the perfect works of fiction they are the perfectest. The truth, in gross and in detail; the concreteness and solidity; the geniality, humanity, and unflagging humor; the steady way in which it keeps up without a dead paragraph; and especially the fidelity with which you stick to the ways of human nature, with the ideal and the un-ideal inseparably beaten up together so that you never give them "clear"--all make them a feast of delight, which, if I mistake not, will last for all future time, or as long as novels _can_ last. Silas is the bigger total success because it deals with a more important story (I think you ought to have made young Corey _angrier_ about Irene's mistake and its consequences); but the _work_ on the much obstructed Lemuel surely was never surpassed. I hope his later life was happy! Altogether _you_ ought to be happy--you can fold your arms and write no more if you like. I've just got your "Criticism and Fiction," which shall speedily be read. And whilst in the midst of this note have received from the postman your clipping from Kate Field's "Washington," the author of which I can't divine, but she's a blessed creature whoever she is. Yours ever, WM. JAMES. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ CAMBRIDGE, _June 20, 1891_. MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--You _are_ magnificent. Here comes your letter at 6 o'clock, just as I am looking wearily out of the window for a change, and makes me feel like an aspiring youth again. But I can't go to Beverly tomorrow, nor indeed leave my room, I fear; for I've had every kind of _-itis_ that can afflict one's upper breathing channels, and although convalescent, am as weak as a blade of grass, and feel as antique as Methusalem. A fortnight hence I shall be like a young puppy-dog again, however, and shall turn up inevitably between two trains more than once ere the summer is over. I've managed to get through Volume I of Scott's Journal in the last two days. The dear old boy! But who would not be "dear" who could have such a mass of doggerel running in his head all the time, and make a hundred thousand dollars a year just by letting his pen trickle? Bless his dear old "unenlightened" soul all the same! The Scotch are the finest race in the world--except the Baltimoreans[98] and Jews--and I think I enjoyed my twenty-four hours of Edinburgh two summers ago more than any twenty-four hours a city ever gave me. Good-bye! I'm describing W. S.'s character when I ought to be describing yours--but you never give me a chance. When I get that task performed, we shall settle down to a solid basis; though probably all that will be in "the dim future." Meanwhile my love to all the Youth and Beauty (including your own) and best wishes for their happiness and freedom from influenzas of every description till the end of time. Affectionately yours, W. J. _To his Sister._ CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 6, 1891_. DEAREST ALICE,--...Of course [this medical verdict on your case may mean] as all men know, a finite length of days; and then, good-bye to neurasthenia and neuralgia and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust all at one stroke--I should think you would be reconciled to the prospect with all its pluses and minuses! I know you've never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us--and life a mere farce of frustration in all, so far as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which we are made respectively capable of feeling an affinity and responding. Your frustrations are only rather more flagrant than the rule; and you've been saved many forms of self-dissatisfaction and misery which appertain to such a multiplication of responsible relations to different people as I, for instance, have got into. Your fortitude, good spirits and unsentimentality have been simply unexampled in the midst of your physical woes; and when you're relieved from your post, just _that_ bright note will remain behind, together with the inscrutable and mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down for all these years. As for that, there's more in it than has ever been told to so-called science. These inhibitions, these split-up selves, all these new facts that are gradually coming to light about our organization, these enlargements of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn for light in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic and unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much more receptive listener--all _that_ philosophy has got to be brought in. And what a queer contradiction comes to the ordinary scientific argument against immortality (based on body being mind's condition and mind going _out_ when body is gone), when one must believe (as now, in these neurotic cases) that some infernality in the body _prevents_ really existing parts of the mind from coming to their effective rights at all, suppresses them, and blots them out from participation in this world's experiences, although they are _there_ all the time. When that which is _you_ passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine _your_ transition without a great oscillation of both "worlds" as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else. It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but, my dear little sister, if one has things present to one's mind, and I know they are present enough to _your_ mind, why not speak them out? I am sure you appreciate that best. How many times I have thought, in the past year, when my days were so full of strong and varied impression and activities, of the long unchanging hours in bed which those days stood for with you, and wondered how you bore the slow-paced monotony at all, as you did! You can't tell how I've pitied you. But you _shall_ come to your rights erelong. Meanwhile take things gently. Look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years. Above all things, save yourself from bodily pain, if it can be done. You've had too much of that. Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this? Beg the good Katharine (to whom _our_ debt can never be extinguished) to write me a line every week, just to keep the currents flowing, and so farewell until I write again. Your ever loving, W. J. * * * * * The reader should not fail to realize, in reading the letter which follows, that it was written, not only while Münsterberg was still a remote young psychologist in Germany, with no claim on James's consideration, but before there was any question of calling him to Harvard. _To Hugo Münsterberg._ CHOCORUA, _July 8, 1891_. DEAR DR. M�NSTERBERG,--I have just read Prof. G. E. Müller's review of you in the G. G. H., and find it in many respects so brutal that I am impelled to send you a word of "consolation," if such a thing be possible. German polemics in general are not distinguished by mansuetude; but there is something peculiarly hideous in the business when an established authority like Müller, instead of administering fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like yourself, shows a malign pleasure in knocking him down and jumping up and down upon his body. All your merits he passes by parenthetically as _selbstverständlich_; your sins he enlarges upon with unction. Don't mind it! Don't be angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered reply!--and great will be your credit and reward! Answer by continuing your work and making it more and more irreproachable. I can't myself agree in some of your theories. _A priori_, your muscular sense-theory of psychic measurements seems to me incredible in many ways. Your general mechanical _Welt-anschauung_ is too abstract and simple for my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this critique of Müller's--a sense for the perspective and proportion of things (so that, for instance, you _don't_ make experiments and quote figures to the 100th decimal, where a coarse qualitative result is all that the question needs). Whose _theories_ in Psychology have any _definitive_ value today? No one's! Their only use is to sharpen farther reflexion and observation. The man who throws out most new ideas and immediately seeks to subject them to experimental control is the most useful psychologist, in the present state of the science. No one has done this as yet as well as you. If you are only _flexible_ towards your theories, and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have been hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your critics before you are forty years old. Too much ambition and too much rashness are marks of a certain type of genius in its youth. The _destiny_ of that genius depends on its power or inability to assimilate and get good out of such criticisms as Müller's. Get the good! forget the bad!--and Müller will live to feel ashamed of his tone. I was very much grieved to learn from Delabarre lately that the doctors had found some weakness in your heart! What a wasteful thing is Nature, to produce a fellow like you, and then play such a trick with him! Bah!--But I prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if you only go _piani piano_. You will do the better work doubtless for doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was dining with some old gentlemen, and one of them asked, "What is the best assurance a man can have of a long and active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied to his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health before one is thirty-five!"--There is much truth in it; and though it applies more to nervous than to other diseases, we all can take our comfort in it. _I_ was entirely broken-down before I was thirty. Yours cordially, WM. JAMES. Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great admiration and gratitude for all they have gained. _To Henry Holt._ CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 24, 1891_. MY DEAR HOLT,--I expect to send you within ten days the MS. of my "Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly 400 pages. By adding some twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all _interest_ in short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs, I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic classic which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's mind. The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I've practically had no vacation so far, and won't touch them during August. I can start them September first up here. I can't rush them through in Cambridge as I did last year; but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and its hours. I _could_ have them done by another man in Cambridge, if there were desperate hurry; but on the whole I should prefer to do them myself. Write and propose something! The larger book seems to be a decided success--especially from the literary point of view. I begin to look down upon Mark Twain! Yours ever, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ ASHEVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 20, 1891_. MY DEAR HARRY,--...Of poor Lowell's death you heard. I left Cambridge the evening of the funeral, for which I had waited over, and meant to write to you about it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I didn't get a moment of time.... He had never been ill in his life till two years ago, and didn't seem to understand or realize the fact as most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his end was approaching until it was close at hand. Few images in my memory are more touching than the picture of his attitude in the last visits I paid him. He was always up and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and tobacco pipes, and ready to talk and be talked to, alluding to his illness with a sort of apologetic and whimsical plaintiveness that had no querulousness in it, though he coughed incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last day of June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a sciatica which had lately supervened. Looking back at him, what strikes one most was his singularly boyish cheerfulness and robustness of temperament. He was a sort of a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like premature old men....[99] * * * * * Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister Miss Anne Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James's parents, for whom he felt an especially affectionate regard. They, and their niece Miss Theodora Sedgwick, lived in Kirkland Street, next door to Professor Child and near the Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well as friends when James moved into his new house. _To Miss Grace Ashburner._ LINVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 25, 1891_. MY DEAR MISS GRACE,--The time has come for that letter to be written! I have been thinking of you ever since I left home; but every letter-writing moment so far has been taken up by the information necessary to be imparted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts, expenses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.; then a long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another to Alice, and one to Katharine Loring; finally, one to my Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to marry _en secondes noces_ a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is ripe for the most ideal correspondent of all! I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina, and am in the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in. Strange to say, it is on the premises of a land speculation and would-be "boom." A tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between 30 and 40 miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded, zigzagging roads built in various directions from the centre, which is a smallish cleared plateau; an exquisite little hotel built; nine cottages round about it; and that is all. Not a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The serpent has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which stand the hills covered with primeval forest of the most beautiful description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas which, through the month of July, must make it ablaze with glory. I went this morning on horseback with the manager of the concern, a really charming young North Carolinian educated at our Institute of Technology, to the top of "Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the Company owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower than Mt. Washington. The road, the forest, the view, the crags were as good as such things can be. Apparently the company had just planted a couple of hundred thousand dollars in _pure esthetics_--a most high-toned proceeding in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad, stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let us enjoy things! There "does be" advantages in creation as opposed to evolution, in the railway, in the telegraph and the electric light, and all that goes with them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness with perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet little modern hotel, has never been realized until our day. But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter in abhorrence: sentiment is the only thing that should be allowed a place in a correspondence between two persons of opposite genders. But to feel sentiment is one thing, and to express it both forcibly and gracefully is another. Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something. As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly say how everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the emotion which accompanies my thoughts of you. Especially in these days when your patience and good spirits add such a halo to you and to your sister too. I am fast overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of satisfaction to feel the process of growing together with one's old friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all speech," so I will say no more. I shall hope to see you, and see you feeling well, before the week is over. Meanwhile, with heartiest affection to your dear sister, and to Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 11, 1892_. MY DEAR HARRY,--...I have been seething in a fever of politics about the future of our philosophy department. Harvard must lead in psychology; and I, having founded her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the practical work. I have _almost_ succeeded, however, in clinching a bargain whereby Münsterberg, the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany, allowance made for his being only 28 years old,--he is in fact the Rudyard Kipling of psychology,--is to come here. When he does he will scoop out all the other universities as far as that line of work goes. We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of which you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present, to work up for a novel or the stage. There's a great comedy yet to be made out of the University newly founded by the American millionaire. In this case the millionaire had announced his desire to found a professorship of psychology applied to education. The thing was to get it for Harvard, which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and nail, trying to persuade him that Royce was the man. Letters, _pour-parlers_, visits (he lives in N. Y.), finally a two-days' visit at this house, and a dinner for him. He is a real Balzackian figure--a regular porker, coarse, vulgar, vain, cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is that he will probably give us nothing,--having got all the attention and flattery from us at which he aimed,--so that we have our labor for our pains, and the gods laugh as they say "served them right." I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoyment of Du Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily believe will be one of the classics of the English tongue. The _beauty_ of it goes beyond everything--and the light and happy touch--the rapid style! Please tell him if you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book fell into Margaret Gibbens's hands, and I have barely seen it. I shan't have time to read it till the voyage.... _To Miss Mary Tappan._ CAMBRIDGE, _April 29, 1892_. MY DEAR MARY,--Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the _point_ of doing--write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things. When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho' practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether that of the _grand monde_, and the information about both people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing from the air was astonishing. We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May--[SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill every chink of time? I _do hope_ we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever, W.J. * * * * * James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were passed in a _pension_ at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de Genève," and there had already been some correspondence between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin. _To Miss Grace Ashburner._ GRYON, SWITZERLAND, _July 13, 1892_. MY DEAR MISS GRACE, or rather, let me say, MY DEAR GRACE,--since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,[100] see us go off and not raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn duty _I_ can have in what remains to me of life will be to save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education, nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one room--to combine these things (I say) with a _holiday_ for _oneself_ is an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?--there is the hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years and _on the whole does not dislike it_ (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous houses either way, and others beside _them_. Yet on that iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village. _Things_ are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are performed, punishments take place--recriminations, arguments, execrations--with a publicity after which, if there _were_ reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its place when _we_ are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we may get used to this as other travelers do--only Arthur and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away! Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given us for that. Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days at a _pension_ on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we had not made before--I mean the family of Joseph Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains. But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought to talk about you. What can I do, however, my dear Grace, except express hopes? I know that you have had a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it well? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffering state? or have you gone on as badly or worse than ever? Of course you can't answer these questions, but some day Theodora will. I devoutly trust that things have gone well and that you may even have been able to see some friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister, to whom pray give the best love of both of us, is I suppose holding her own as bravely as ever; only I should like to know the fact, and that too Theodora will doubtless ere long acquaint us with. To that last-named exemplary and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe me, always your affectionate, WM. JAMES. Love to all the Childs, please, and all the Nortons who may be within reach. _To Theodore Flournoy._ PENSIONE VILLA MAGGIORE (PALLANZA), _Sept. 19, 1892_. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your most agreeable letter--one of those which one preserves to read in one's old age--came yesterday.... I am much obliged to you for the paper by Sécretan, and (unless you deny me the permission) I propose to keep it, and let you get a new one, which you can do more easily than I. It is much too oracular and brief, but its _pregnancy_ is a good example of what an intellect gains by growing old: one says vast things simply. I read it stretched on the grass of Monte Motterone, the Rigi of this region, just across the Lake, with all the kingdoms of the earth stretched before me, and I realized how exactly a philosophic _Weltansicht_ resembles that from the top of a mountain. You are driven, as you ascend, into a choice of fewer and fewer paths, and at last you end in two or three simple attitudes from each of which we see a great part of the Universe amazingly simplified and summarized, but nowhere the entire view at once. I entirely agree that Renouvier's system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the classical and consistent expression of _one_ of the great attitudes: that of insisting on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, one must abandon the hope of _formulas_ altogether, which is what all pious sentimentalists do; and with them M. Sécretan, since he fails to give any articulate substitute for the "Criticism" he finds so unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible ones, as when Sécretan makes a _memoire sans oubli_ = _duratio tota simul_ = eternity! I have been reading with much interest the articles on the will by Fouillée, in the "Revue Philosophique" for June and August. There are admirable descriptive pages, though the final philosophy fails to impress me much. I am in good condition now, and must try to do a little methodical work every day in Florence, in spite of the temptations to _flânerie_ of the sort of life. I did hope to have spent a few days in Geneva before crossing the mountains! But perhaps, for the holidays, you and Madame Flournoy will cross them to see us at Florence. The Vers-chez-les-Blanc days are something that neither she nor I will forget! You and I are strangely contrasted as regards our professorial responsibilities: you are becoming entangled in laboratory research and demonstration just as I am getting emancipated. As regards _demonstrations_, I think you will not find much difficulty in concocting a programme of classical observations on the senses, etc., for students to verify; it worked much more easily at Harvard than I supposed it would when we applied it to the whole class, and it improved the spirit of the work very much. As regards _research_, I advise you not to take that duty too conscientiously, if you find that ideas and projects do not abound. As long as [a] man is working at anything, he must give up other things at which he might be working, and the best thing he can work at is usually the thing he does most spontaneously. You philosophize, according to your own account, more spontaneously than you work in the laboratory. So do I, and I always felt that the occupation of philosophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting laboratory work, since there is not time for both. Your work as a philosopher will be more _irreplaceable_ than what results you might get in the laboratory out of the same number of hours. Some day, I feel sure, you will find yourself impelled to publish some of your reflections. Until then, take notes and read, and feel that your true destiny is on the way to its accomplishment! It seems to me that a great thing would be to add a new course to your instruction. Au revoir, my dear friend! My wife sends "a great deal of love" to yours, and says she will write to her as soon as we get settled. I also send my most cordial greetings to Madame Flournoy. Remember me also affectionately to those charming young _demoiselles_, who will, I am afraid, incontinently proceed to forget me. Always affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. _To William M. Salter._ FLORENCE, _Oct. 6, 1892_. ...So the magician Renan is no more! I don't know whether you were ever much subject to his spell. If so, you have a fine subject for Sunday lectures! The queer thing was that he so slowly worked his way to his natural mental attitude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral and religious material. He levitated at last to his true level of superficiality, emancipating himself from layer after layer of the inhibitions into which he was born, and finally using the old moral and religious vocabulary to produce merely musical and poetic effects. That moral and religious ideals, seriously taken, involve certain refusals and renunciations of freedom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget. On the whole, his sweetness and mere literary coquetry leave a displeasing impression, and the only way to handle him is not to take him heavily or seriously. The worst is, he was a prig in his ideals.... _To James J. Putnam._ 16 PIAZZA DELL'INDIPENDENZA, FLORENCE, _Oct. 7, 1892_. MY DEAR JIM,--We got your delightful letter ever so long ago, and nothing but invincible lethargy on my part, excusing itself to conscience by saying, "I mustn't write till I have something definitive to announce," is responsible for this delay. The lethargy was doubtless the healthy reversion of the nervous system to its normal equilibrium again, so I let it work. And the conscientious sophism was not so unreasonable after all. My brain has gradually got working in a natural manner again, and we are definitively settled for the winter, so the time for a line to you has come. To begin with, your letter sounded delicious, and I like to think of you as enjoying the neighborhood of our good little [Chocorua] lake so much, and particularly as expressing such satisfaction in the look of our little place. If it hasn't "style," it has at least a harmonious domesticity of appearance. A recent letter referred to "Dr. Putnam's" place on the hill across the lake, as if you or Charlie might have been buying over there too. Is this so? I shall be very glad if it is so. As for ourselves, coming abroad with a pack of children is not the same thing in reality as it is on paper. A summer full of passive enjoyment is one thing, a summer full of care for the present and anxious schemes for the coming winter is another. When you come abroad, come with Marian for the summer only and leave the children at home. Of course they have gained perception and intelligence, and if this Florence school only turns out well, they will have a good deal of French, and other experiences which will be precious to them hereafter; so that on their [account] there will be nothing to regret. But the parental organism in sore need of recuperative vacation gets a great deal more of it per dollar and per day if allowed to wander by itself. Enough now of this philosophy!... I am telling you nothing of our summer, most all of which was passed in Switzerland. Germany is good, but Switzerland is better. _How_ good Switzerland is, is something that can't be described in words. The healthiness of it passes all utterance--the air, the roads, the mountains, the customs, the institutions, the people. Not a breath of art, poetry, esthetics, morbidness, or "suggestions"! It is all there, solid meat and drink for the sick body and soul, ready to be turned to, and do you infallible good when the nervous and gas-lit side of life has had too much play. What a see-saw life is, between the elemental things and the others! We must have both; but aspiration for aspiration, I think that of the over-cultured and exquisite person for the insipidity of health is the more pathetic. After the suggestiveness, decay and over-refinement of Florence this winter, I shall be hungry enough for the eternal elements to be had in Schweiz. I didn't do any high climbing, for which my legs and _Schwindeligkeit_ both unfit me, but any amount of solid moderate walking (say four to six hours a day), which did me a lot of good. I envy the climbers, though! Now that my brain begins to work again, I have mapped out a profitable course of winter reading, _Naturphilosophie_ and _Kunstgeschichte_, and, if the boys' school is only as good as it is cracked up to be, we shall have had a good year. Alice is very well, and much refreshed in spite of maternal cares and perplexities.... Love from both of us to both of you, and wishes for a good winter. Love also to all your family circle, especially Annie, and to Mrs. Wynne if she be near. W. J. _To Miss Grace Ashburner._ 6 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZA FLORENCE, _Oct. 19, 1892_. MY DEAR GRACE,--It is needless to say that your long and delightful reply written by Theodora's self-effacing hand reached us duly, and that I have "been on the point" of writing to you again ever since. That "point" as you well know, is one to which somehow one seems long to cleave without jumping off. But at last here goes--irrevocably! I did not expect that in your condition you would be either so conscientious or so energetic as to send so immediate and full a return, and I must expressly stipulate, my dear old friend, that the sole condition upon which I write now is that you shall not feel that I expect a single word of answer. (Needless to say, however, how much any infringement of this condition on your part will be _enjoyed_.) Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that first week in September, though, as it turned out, we should have had a fine rest of the month if we had stayed. We crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, where we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and then came straight to Florence by the 21st. As almost no strangers had arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished apartments, most of which threatened great bleakness or gloominess for the winter, with their high ceilings, and _some_ rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our family seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are made! We found but this one into all the rooms of which the sun can come either before- or after-noon. It is clean, and abundantly furnished with sofas and chairs, but not a "convenience for housekeeping" of any kind whatsoever. No oven in which to make the macaroni _au gratin_, no place to keep more than a week's supply of charcoal, or I fear more than three or four days' supply of wood for the fire when the cold weather comes, as come it will with a vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children won't freeze! Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occupation."[101] What they need is comrades of their own age, and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams--even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a _second_ year! For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of organic protestation against certain things here, the toneless air in the streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the "general debility" which pervades all ways and institutions, the worn-out faces, etc., etc. But the charming sunny manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever you cast your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art, redeem it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which might well end by turning one into one of these mere northern loungers here for the rest of one's days, recreant to all one's native instincts. The stagnancy of the thermometer is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air, sometimes sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference except possibly from week to week the faintest possible progress in the direction of cold. It must be very good for one's nerves after our acrobatic climate. We have an excellent man-cook, the most faithful of beings, at two and a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to market, and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots without terminations in which we hold _un_sweet discourse with him. But on Dante and Charles Norton's _admirable_ "pony" I am getting up the lingo fast! All this time I am saying nothing about you or your sister, or the dear Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of your own condition we have got very scanty news indeed since your letter.... Perhaps Theodora will just sit down and write two pages,--not a letter, if she isn't ready; but just two pages--to give some authentic account of how the fall finds you all, especially you. I hope the opium business and all has not given you additional trouble, and that the pain has not made worse havoc than before. When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my dear, dear Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to the Higher Powers for the example. Please take the heartfelt love of both of us, give some to your dear sister and to Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate, WM. JAMES. Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the Childs. _To Josiah Royce._ FLORENCE, _Dec. 18, 1892_. BELOVED JOSIAH,--Your letter of Oct. 12, with "missent Indian mail" stamped upon its envelope in big letters, was handed in only ten days ago, after I had long said in my heart that you were no true friend to leave me thus languishing so long in ignorance of all that was befalling in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for everything, so I am not now writing to ask you for my diamonds back, or to return my ringlet of your hair. It was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the hearts of both of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from the Gibbenses that you are made Professor--I fear at not more than $3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congratulate you most heartily thereupon. What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some estimate of Münsterberg, and when you say, "he is an immense success," you may imagine how I am pleased. He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have a strong impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover, his naïveté and openness of nature make him very lovable. I do hope that [his] English will go--of course there can be no question of the students liking him, when once he gets his communications open. He has written me exhaustive letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the amount of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in his holy keeping! From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from Cambridge makes it seem like a little seething Florence of the XVth Century. Having all the time there is, to myself, I of course find I have no time for doing any particular duties, and the consequence is that the days go by without anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and are comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the clammy quality of the cold rather than its intensity seems to necessitate, and Italianism is "striking in" to all of us to various degrees of depth, shallowest of all I fear in Peg and the baby. When _Gemüthlichkeit_ is banished from the world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners as well as stone and stuffs! I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I have written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend to the attention of your gentle partner.[102] ... Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times--a fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of him, and wish he'd come and live in Cambridge. I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little "notice" in matters philosophical. I am now reading Wundt's curiously long-winded "System," which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of _soaping_ everything on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or _aperçu_, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I am just beginning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a queer manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times, but with whom I shall probably later take some walks. He seems a good and well-informed fellow, much devoted to astronomy, and I have urged your works on his attention. He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which I read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue! Perhaps I shall get straight. I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier's "Principes de la Nature" for Schurman.[103] Renouvier cannot be _true_--his world is so much _dust_. But that conception is a _zu überwindendes Moment_, and he has given it its most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the end, a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought to interest you much from the point of view of your own Cosmology. Münsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in my reply, that Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new Yale psychology review, but that he wished to publish in a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear of each of these little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should really like would be a philosophic _monthly_ in America, which would be all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France. If it were a monthly, Münsterberg could find room for all his contributions from the laboratory. But I don't suppose that Scripture will combine with Schurman any more than Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don't know whether Schurman himself would wish it.... What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started? Is music raging round you both as of yore? How are the children? We heard last night the new opera by Mascagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a _furore_ here and which I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up to? You can't tell how thick the atmosphere of Cambridge seems over here? "Surcharged with vitality," in short. Write again whenever you can spare a fellow a half hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of us to both of you, yours always, WM. JAMES. Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Münsterberg, and all. _To Miss Grace Norton._ FLORENCE, _Dec. 28, 1892_. MY DEAR GRACE,--I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!--but have _you_ never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate--a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if _you_ were finite too--for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable _laziness_--a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.--However, it _is_ dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin. You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return. The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler--"Maestro" she calls him--three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply. Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here--I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as _basking_ in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house? Duveneck[104] is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if _everything_ could be converted into words, words, words. I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was addressed, was Mrs. James's sister. _To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor)._ FLORENCE, _Jan. 3, 1893_. BELOVED MARGARET,--A happy New Year to you all! My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice's social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success. She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of our ménage at that time, you would have excused the terrible severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the copious eloquence in which I described our past, present, and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress, and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made _me_, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversation at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year's night; I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confident and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the handmaids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petticoats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely--and then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the conversation going till after eleven o'clock. I humbly prostrated myself before her after it was over,--for the table really looked sweet--no human being would have believed it beforehand,--threw the wood-ashes on my head, and swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I would write to you in token of my shame. It will please your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her diet is still eccentric,--flying from one extreme of abstinence to another,--and her sleep fitful and accidental in its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful countenance from which all traces of struggle have disappeared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious--at least she did this once lately.... P.S. On reading this to Alice she says she doesn't see what call I had to write it, and that as for my obstructing the dinner, I hadn't made it more impossible than I always make everything. This with a sweet ironical smile which I can't give on paper.... _To Francis Boott._ FLORENCE, _Jan. 30, 1893_. DEAR MR. BOOTT,--Your letter of Dec. 15th was very welcome, with its home gossip and its Florentine advice. Our winter has worn away, as you see, with very little discomfort from cold. It is true that I have been irritated at the immovable condition of my bed-room thermometer which, for five weeks, has been at 40°F., not shifting in all that time more than one degree either way, until I longed for a change; but how much better such steadfastness than the acrobatic performances of our American winter-thermometer. You and other sybarites scared us so, in the fall, about the arctic cold we should have, that I used daily to make vows to the Creator and the Saints that, if they would only carry us safely to the first of February, I never would ask them for another favor as long as I lived. With the impending winter once _overcome_ I thought life would be one long vista of relief thenceforth. But practically there has been nothing _to_ overcome. I am glad, however, that now that January disappears, we may have some warm days, coming more and more frequently. The spring must be really delicious. We are keeping as shy of "Society" as we can, but still we see a good many people, and the interruptions to study (from that, and the domestic causes which abound in our narrow quarters--narrow in winter-time, broad enough when fires go out) are very great. Duveneck[105] spent a most delightful evening here a while ago, and left a big portfolio of photos of Böcklin's pictures and a big bunch of cigars for me two days later. I wish I didn't always feel like a _phrase-monger_ with honest artists like him. However there are some fellows who seem phrase-mongers to me, X----, _e.g._, so it's "square."... We have a cook, Raffaello, the most modest and faithful of his sex. Our manner of communication with him is _awful_; but he finishes all our sentences for us, and, strange to say, just as we would have finished them if we could. Alice swears we must bring him home to America. Should you think it safe? He seems to have no friends or diversions here, and no love except for his saucepans. But I dread the responsibility of being foster-father to him in our cold and uncongenial land. It would be different if I spoke his lingo.--What do _you_ think? And _what_ a pretty lingo it is! Italian and German seem to me _the_ languages. The mongrels French and English might drop out! Apropos to English, I return your slip [about the teaching of English?] "as per request," having been amused at the manifestation of the ruling passion in you. I don't care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy and clearness. But I do pity the poor English Department. I see they are talking in England of more study of their own tongue in the schools being required.... Mark Twain dined with us last night, in company with the good Villari and the charming Mrs. Villari; but there was no chance then to ask him to sing Nora McCarty. He's a dear man, and there'll be a chance yet. He is in a delightful villa at Settignano, and says he has written more in the past four months than he could have done in two years at Hartford. Well! good-bye, dear old friend. Yours ever, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ FLORENCE, _Mar. 17, 1893_. ...I don't wonder that it seems strange to you that we should be leaving here just in the glory of the year. _Your_ view of Italy is that of the tourist; and that is really the only way to _enjoy_ any place. Ours is that of the resident in whom the sweet decay breathed in for six months has produced a sort of physiological craving for a change to robuster air. One ends by craving one's own more permanent attitude, and a country whose language I can speak and where I can settle into my own necessary work (which has been awfully prevented here of late), without a guilty sense that I am neglecting the claims of pictures and monuments, is the better environment now. In short, Italy has well served its purpose by us and we shall be eternally grateful. But we have no farther use for it, and the spring is also beautiful in lands that will [be] fresher to our senses. There are moments when the Florentine debility becomes really hateful to one, and I don't see how the Lorings and others can come and make their home with it. You have done the best thing, in putting yourself in the strongest _milieu_ to be found on earth. But Italy is incomparable as a refreshing refuge, and I am sorry that you are likely to lose it this year.... _To François Pillon._ [Post-card] LONDON, _June 17, 1893_. You can hardly imagine how strong my disappointment was in losing you in Paris--when we might have found you by going to Alcan's on Monday, or by writing you before we came. It seems now sheer folly! But I didn't think of the possibility of your being gone so early in the summer. Our three young children are all in Switzerland, the older boy in Munich, and my wife and I are like middle-aged omnibus-horses let loose in a pasture. The first time we have had a holiday together for 15 years. I feel like a barrel without hoops! We shall be here in England for a month at least. After that everything is uncertain. I _may_ not even pass through Paris again. W. J. _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ LONDON, _June 23, 1893_. MY DEAR HODGSON,--I am more different kinds of an ass, or rather I am (without ceasing to be different kinds) the same kind more often than any other living man! This morning I knocked at your door, inwardly exultant with the certainty that I should find you, and learned that you had left for Saltburn just one hour ago! A week ago yesterday the same thing happened to me at Pillon's in Paris, and because of the same reason, my having announced my presence a day too late. My wife and I have been here six days. As it was her first visit to England and she had a lot of clothes to get, having worn out her American supply in the past year, we thought we had better remain _incog._ for a week, drinking in London irresponsibly, and letting the dressmakers have their will with her time. I early asked at your door whether you were in town and visible, and received a reassuring reply, so I felt quite safe and devoted myself to showing my wife the sights, and enjoying her naïf wonder as she drank in Britain's greatness. Four nights ago at 9:30 P.M. I pointed out to her (as possibly the climax of greatness) your library windows with one of them open and bright with the inner light. She said, "Let's ring and see him." My heart palpitated to do so, but it was late and a hot night, and I was afraid you might be in tropical costume, safe for the night, and my hesitation lost us. We came home. It is too, too bad! I wanted much to see you, for though, my dear Hodgson, our correspondence has languished of late (the effect of encroaching eld), my sentiments to you-ward (as the apostle would say) are as lively as ever, and I recognize in you always the friend as well as the master. Are you likely to come back to London at all? Our plans didn't exactly lie through Yorkshire, but they are vague and may possibly be changed. But what I wanted my wife to see was S. H. H. in his own golden-hued library with the rumor of the cab-stand filling the air.... But write, you noble old philosopher and dear young man, to yours always, WM. JAMES. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ LONDON, _July 8, 1893_. DARLING MILLER,--I must still for a while call you darling, in spite of your Toryism, ecclesiasticism, determinism, and general diabolism, which will probably result in your ruthlessly destroying me both as a man and as a philosopher some day. But sufficient unto that day will be its evil, so let me take advantage of the hours before "black-manhood comes" and still fondle you for a while upon my knee. And both you and Angell, being now colleagues and not students, had better stop Mistering or Professoring me, or I shall retaliate by beginning to "Mr." and "Prof." you.... What you say of Erdmann, Uphues and the atmosphere of German academic life generally, is exceedingly interesting. If we can only keep our own humaner tone in spite of the growing complication of interests! I think we shall in great measure, for there is nothing here in English academic circles that corresponds to the German savagery. I do hope we may meet in Switzerland shortly, and you can then tell me what Erdmann's greatness consists in.... I have done hardly any reading since the beginning of March. My genius for being frustrated and interrupted, and our unsettled mode of life have played too well into each other's hands. The consequence is that I rather long for settlement, and the resumption of the harness. If I only had working strength not to require these abominably costly vacations! Make the most of these days, my dear Miller. They will never exactly return, and will be looked back to by you hereafter as quite ideal. I am glad you have assimilated the German opportunities so well. Both Hodder and Angell have spoken with admiration of the methodical way in which you have forged ahead. It is a pity you have not had a chance at England, with which land you seem to have so many inward affinities. If you are to come here let me know, and I can give you introductions. Hodgson is in Yorkshire and I've missed him. Myers sails for the Chicago Psychic Congress, Aug. 2nd. Sidgwick may still be had, perhaps, and Bryce, who will give you an order to the Strangers' Gallery. The House of Commons, cradle of all free institutions, is really a wonderful and moving sight, and at bottom here the people are more good-natured on the Irish question than one would think to listen to their strong words. The cheery, active English temperament beats the world, I believe, the Deutschers included. But so cartilaginous and unsentimental as to the _Gemüth_! The girls like boys and the men like horses! I shall be greatly interested in your article. As for Uphues, I am duly uplifted that such a man should read me, and am ashamed to say that amongst my pile of sins is that of having carried about two of his books with me for three or four years past, always meaning to read, and never actually reading them. I only laid them out again yesterday to take back to Switzerland with me. Such things make me despair. Paulsen's _Einleitung_ is the greatest treat I have enjoyed of late. His synthesis is to my mind almost lamentably unsatisfactory, but the book makes a station, an _étape_, in the expression of things. Good-bye--my wife comes in, ready to go out to lunch, and thereafter to Haslemere for the night. She sends love, and so do I. Address us when you get to Switzerland to M. Cérésole, as above, "la Chiesaz sur Vevey (Vaud), and believe me ever yours, WM. JAMES. _To Henry James._ THE SALTERS' HILL-TOP [near CHOCORUA], _Sept. 22, 1893_. ...I am up here for a few days with Billy, to close our house for the winter, and get a sniff of the place. The Salters have a noble hill with such an outlook! and a very decent little house and barn. But oh! the difference from Switzerland, the thin grass and ragged waysides, the poverty-stricken land, and sad American sunlight over all--sad because so empty. There is a strange thinness and femininity hovering over all America, so different from the stoutness and masculinity of land and air and everything in Switzerland and England, that the coming back makes one feel strangely sad and hardens one in the resolution never to go away again unless one can go to end one's days. Such a divided soul is very bad. To you, who now have real practical relations and a place in the old world, I should think there was no necessity of ever coming back again. But Europe has been made what it is by men staying in their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after generation for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have got--we must abide and do the same.[106] As England struck me newly and differently last time, so America now--force and directness in the people, but a terrible grimness, more ugliness than I ever realized in things, and a greater weakness in nature's beauty, such as it is. One must pitch one's whole sensibility first in a different key--then gradually the quantum of personal happiness of which one is susceptible fills the cup--but the moment of change of key is lonesome.... We had the great Helmholtz and his wife with us one afternoon, gave them tea and invited some people to meet them; she, a charming woman of the world, brought up by her aunt, Madame Mohl, in Paris; he the most monumental example of benign calm and speechlessness that I ever saw. He is growing old, and somewhat weary, I think, and makes no effort beyond that of smiling and inclining his head to remarks that are made. At least he made no response to remarks of mine; but Royce, Charles Norton, John Fiske, and Dr. Walcott, who surrounded him at a little table where he sat with tea and beer, said that he spoke. Such power of calm is a great possession. I have been twice to Mrs. Whitman's, once to a lunch and reception to the Bourgets a fortnight ago. Mrs. G----, it would seem, has kept them like caged birds (probably because they wanted it so); Mrs. B. was charming and easy, he ill at ease, refusing to try English unless compelled, and turning to _me_ at the table as a drowning man to a "hencoop," as if there were safety in the presence of anyone connected with you. I could do nothing towards inviting them, in the existent state of our ménage; but when, later, they come back for a month in Boston, I shall be glad to bring them into the house for a few days. I feel quite a fellow feeling for him; he seems a very human creature, and it was a real pleasure to me to see a Frenchman of B.'s celebrity _look_ as ill at ease as I myself have often _felt_ in fashionable society. They are, I believe, in Canada, and have only too much society. I shan't go to Chicago, for economy's sake--besides I _must_ get to work. But _everyone_ says one ought to sell all one has and mortgage one's soul to go there; it is esteemed such a revelation of beauty. People cast away all sin and baseness, burst into tears and grow religious, etc., under the influence!! _Some_ people evidently.... The people about home are very pleasant to meet.... Yours ever affectionately, WM. JAMES. END OF VOLUME I MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG. BOSTON * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: He tried to make up for the deficiences=>He tried to make up for the deficiencies "little genuises"=>"little geniuses" I am desirious of reading=>I am desirous of reading Et peut-on savoir jusqu'ou=>Et peut-on savoir jusqu'où Dés que ma santé=>Dès que ma santé Journal of Speculative Philsophy=>Journal of Speculative Philosophy end was apporaching until it was close at hand=>end was approaching until it was close at hand FOOTNOTES: [1] _Literary Remains of Henry James_, p. 151. [2] Henry James (in _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 5) says of Catherine Barber; "She represented for us in our generation the only English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins." She may well have seemed to her grandson to be of a different type from other members of the family, who were more recently, and doubtless obviously, Irish or Scotch; but the statement is incorrect. John Barber was the son of Patrick Barber, who came from Longford County, Ireland, about 1750 and settled at Neelytown near Newburgh (after having lived in New York City and Princeton) about 1764, and of Jannet Rhea (or Rea) whose parents were well-to-do people in old Shawangunk in 1790. Whatever may have been the previous history of the Rhea family, their name does not suggest an English origin. Both Patrick Barber and Matthew Rhea were pillars of Goodwill Presbyterian Church in Montgomery. [3] See _Literary Remains_, p. 149. [4] If the reader were familiar, as he cannot be presumed to have been, with the elder Henry James or his writings, he would be in no danger of finding anything cold or qualifying in these words, but would discern a true adoration expressing itself in a way that was peculiarly characteristic of their writer. For Henry James, Senior, a spiritual democracy deeper than that of our political jargon was not a mere conception: it was an unquestioned reality. The outer wrappings in which people swathed their souls excited him to anger and ridicule more often than praise; but when men or women seemed to him beautiful or adorable he thought it was because they betrayed more naturally than others the inward possession of that humble "social" spirit which he wanted to think of as truly a common possession--God's equal gift to each and all. To say of his mother that _that_ could be felt in her, that she was _merely_ that, was his purest praise. The reader may find this habit of his thought expressing itself anew in William James by turning to a letter on page 210 below. That letter might have been written by Henry James, Senior. [5] The places of two of the eleven who died early were taken by their orphaned children. [6] According to the Rev. Hugh Walsh of Newburgh, who has worked out the Walsh genealogy. _A Small Boy and Others_ (page 6) says "Killyleagh." [7] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 8. [8] _Literary Remains of Henry James_, Introduction, p. 9. [9] See, further, _Notes of a Son and Brother_, pp. 181 _et seq._ [10] _Society of the Redeemed Form of Man_, quoted in the Introduction to _Literary Remains_, p. 57, _et seq._ [11] Letter to Shadworth H. Hodgson, p. 241 _infra_. [12] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 216. [13] _Vide_ also a passage in the _Literary Remains_, at p. 104. [14] _Life of E. L. Godkin_, vol. II, p. 218. New York, 1907. [15] _Early Years of the Saturday Club_; E. W. Emerson's chapter on Henry James, Senior, p. 328. There follows a delightful account of a "Conversation" at R. W. Emerson's house in Concord, at which Henry James, Senior, upset a prepared discourse of Alcott's and launched himself into an attack on "Morality." Whereupon Miss Mary Moody Emerson, "eighty-four years old and dressed underneath without doubt, in her shroud," seized him by the shoulders and shook him and rebuked him. "Mr. James beamed with delight and spoke with most chivalrous courtesy to this Deborah bending over him." [16] Some passages in William James's early letters to his family might seem labored. They should be read with this in mind. An especially high-sounding phrase or a flight into a grand style was understood as a signal meaning "fun," and such passages are never to be taken as serious. [17] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 207. [18] "I have fully decided to try being a painter. I shall know in a year or two whether I am made to be one. If not, it will be easy to retreat. There's nothing in the world so despicable as a bad artist." (1860.) [19] For James's use of Touchstone's question, see p. 190 _infra_. [20] _Cf._ Henry James's _Life of W. W. Story_, vol. II, p. 204, where there is a passage which sounds reminiscent of the author's father and brother. [21] The following entries occur among some "notes on his students" which President Eliot made at the time-- "First term, '61-'62, James, W., entered this term, passed examination on qualitative analysis well." "Second term, '61-'62, James, W., studied quantitative analysis. Irregular in attendance at laboratory, passed examination on Fownes's Organic Chemistry, mark 85." "First term, '62-'63, James, W., studied quantitative analysis and was tolerably punctual at recitations till Thanksgiving, when he began an investigation of the effects of different bread-raising materials on the urine. He worked steadily on this until the end of the term, mastering the processes, and studying the effect of yeast on bicarbonate of sodium and bitartrate of potash." The investigation referred to consisted of experiments of which he himself was the subject. There is no record for the second term of 1862-63. President Eliot has generously supplied the Editor with a memorandum on William James's connection with the College, from which these, and several statements below, have been drawn. [22] The expression was undoubtedly recognized in Kay Street as borrowed from the Lincolnshire boor, in Fitzjames Stephen's Essay on Spirit-Rapping, who ended his life with the words, "What with faith, and what with the earth a-turning round the sun, and what with the railroads a-fuzzing and a-whizzing, I'm clean stonied, muddled and beat." [23] A diary of Mr. T. S. Perry's has fixed the date of this visit as Oct. 31-Nov. 4. [24] W. J. could make much better drawings than the ones which he enclosed in this letter. [25] A horse. [26] N. S. Shaler, _Autobiography_, pp. 105 _ff._ [27] _Harvard Advocate_, Oct. 1, 1874. [28] The "great anthropomorphological collection" consisted of photographs of authors, scientists, public characters, and also people whose only claim upon his attention was that their physiognomies were in some way typical or striking. James never arranged the collection or preserved it carefully, but he filled at least one album in early days, and he almost always kept some drawer or box at hand and dropped into it portraits cut from magazines or obtained in other ways. He seemed to crave a visual image of everybody who interested him at all. [29] All theory is gray, dear friend, But the golden tree of life is green. [30] See _Memories and Studies_, pp. 6, 8, and 9; and the address on Agassiz, _passim_. [31] The case of small-pox left no scar whatever. Indeed James afterward regarded it as having been perhaps no small-pox at all, but only varioloid, and by October he described himself as being in better health than ever before. During several weeks of convalescence that followed his distressing experience in quarantine he was, however, quite naturally, "blue and despondent." [32] This house has since been enlarged and converted into the Colonial Club. [33] John A. Allen, another of the Brazilian party. [34] Miss Dixwell became Mrs. O. W. Holmes; the other two, Mrs. E. W. Gurney and Mrs. William E. Darwin respectively. [35] Miss Kate Havens of Stamford, Conn., a fellow _pensionnaire_ at Frau Spannenberg's, has kindly supplied a helpful memorandum. [36] An accompanying drawing presented a telescopic exaggeration of features, which are hardly appropriate to the Christian Strasse. [37] The notice of Grimm's _Unüberwindliche Mächte_ appeared under the title "A German-American Novel" in the _Nation_, 1867; vol. V, p. 432. [38] The Herr Professor was later identified as W. Dilthey. [39] I send you a thousand kisses. [40] "When in his grotesque moods [the elder Henry James] maintained that, to a right-minded man, a crowded Cambridge horse-car 'was the nearest approach to Heaven upon earth.'" E. L. Godkin, _Life_, vol. II, p. 117. [41] An allusion to a picture in the parlor which had formerly belonged to the Thieses. [42] A devoted family servant. [43] A daughter of Henry James, Senior's, English friend J. J. Garth Wilkinson. "Wilky" James had been named after Mr. Wilkinson. See _Notes of a Son and Brother_, p. 196. [44] A note-book in which there are many pages of titles, under dates between 1867 and 1872, appears to have been a record of reading; it was not kept systematically and is incomplete. The following entries were made between the date "June 21, '69--M.D."--the date of graduation from the Medical School--and the end of the year 1869. It will be understood that "R 2 M" signified the _Revue des deux Mondes_. The original entries stand in a column, without punctuation, and occupy two and a half pages. Amplifications are added in brackets:-- "A. Dumas, fils; Père prod[igue], 1/2 Monde; Fils naturel, Question D'Argent. / Jung; Stilling's Leben. [5 vols. 1806]. / J. S. Mill; Subjection of Women [1869]. / H[orace] Bushnell; Woman suffrage, etc. [1869]. / Balzac; Le curé de Tours. / Browning; The Ring and the Book. / Ravaison [Mollien]; Rapport s. l. Philosophie [La philosophie en France au xixe Siècle. Paris, 1868]. / Goethe; Aus meinem Leben. / Coquerel fils; [Perhaps Athanase Josué Coquerel, 1820-1875, author of "Libres études" (1867)]. / Em. Burnouf; [La] Sc[ience] des Relig[ions, vi. Les orthodoxies, comment elles se forment et déclinent] R2M. July 1, 69. / Leblais; Matérialisme and Sp[iri]t[ua]l[i]sme. [Paris, 1865]. / Littré; Paroles de [la] Philos[ophie] pos[itive, 1859]. / Caro; le Mat[érialis]me and la Science [1868]. / Comte and Littré; principes de Phil. pos. [Comte, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols., 2nd ed. with preface by Littré. Paris, 1864]. / Littré, Bridges; replies to Mill. [Bridges, John Henry. Unity of Comte's life and doctrine; a reply to strictures on Comte's later writings, addressed to J. S. Mill. London, 1866]. / H. Spencer; Reasons for dissenting from Comte. / Secrétan; Preface to Phil. de la Liberté [1848]. / Schopenhauer; das Metaph. Bedürfniss. / H[enry] James [sen.]; Moralism and Christianity [N.Y. 1850]. / Jouffroy; Dist. ent. Psych. and Phys. [Part of the "Mélanges Philosophiques"?]. / Benedikt; Electrotherap[ie], first 100 pp. / Lecky; History of Morals [2 vols. 1869]. / Froude; Short Studies, etc. (skimmed). / Duke of Argyle; Primeval Man [1869]. / Turgeneff; Nouvelles Moscovites. / Lewes: [Biographical] Hist. of Phil., Prolegomena, Kant, Comte. / Geo. Sand; Constance Verrier. / Mérimée; Lokis. R2M. 15 Sept. 69. / J. Grote; Exploratio philosophica, [1865]. / H[enry] James [Sen.]; Lectures and Miscellanies. [1852]. / [K. J?] Simrock. / C. Reade; Griffith Gaunt. / G. Droz; Autour d'une Source. / O. Feuillet. / D. F. Strauss; Chr[istian] Marklin. Mannheim. 1851. / M. Müller; Chips [from a German workshop] vol. I and vol. II partly. / Lis [Elisa?] Maier; W. Humboldt's Leben. [1865]. / Lis Maier; Geo. Forster's [Leben, 1856]. / Schleiermacher; Correspondenz. vol. I. / Réville; Israelitic monotheism, R2M, 1er Sept. 69. [La religion primitive d'Israel et le développement du monothéisme]. / Deutsch; Islam. Quarterly Rev. Oct. '69. / Fichte; Best[immung] des Gelehrten. i and ii Vorlesungen. / Ste.-Beuve; Art[icle on] Leopardi, [in] Port[raits] cont[emporains] iii. / Westm[inster]: Rev[iew] Art. on Lecky. Oct. 69. / [T. G. von] Hippel; Selbstleben. / Vita de Leopardi. / Fichte; Bestim[mung] des Menschen. / Gwinner; Schopenhauer. /" Thanks are due to Mr. E. F. Walbridge, Librarian of the New York Harvard Club, for identifying a number of abbreviated titles. [45] _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 130, note. The quotation is literal. The subject of the foot-note in the _Psychology_ is "the author." [46] See, for example, the use made of Touchstone's question, in the _Nation_ in 1876 (quoted on page 190 _infra_). James was certainly unconscious of the repetition when he wrote page 7 of _Some Problems of Philosophy_. Consider also, a few sentences from a notice of Morley's _Voltaire_ (_Atlantic Monthly_, 1872, vol. XXX, p. 624). "As the opinions of average men are swayed more by examples and types than by mere reasons, so a personality so accomplished as Mr. Morley's cannot fail by its mere attractiveness to influence all who come within its reach and inspire them with a certain friendliness toward the faith that animates it. The standard example, Goethe, is ever at hand. But to be thus widely effective, a man must not be a specialist. Mr. John Mill, weighty and many-sided as he is by nature and culture, is yet deficient in the æsthetic direction; and the same is true of M. Littré in France. Their lances lack that final tipping with light that made Voltaire's so irresistible. What Henry IV's soldiers followed was his white plume; and that imponderable superfluity, grace, in some shape, seems one factor without which no awakening of men's sympathies on a large scale can take place." [47] _William James_, by Theodore Flournoy (Geneva, 1911), p. 149 note. [48] Grubbing among subtleties. [49] Regardings, or contemplative views. [50] MS. doubtful. [51] "I made a discovery in sending in my credentials to the Dean which gratified me. It was that, adding in conscientiously every week in which I have had anything to do with medicine, I can't sum up more than three years and two or three months. Three years is the minimum with which one can go up for examination; but as I began away back in '63, I have been considering myself as having studied about five years, and have felt much humiliated by the greater readiness of so many younger men to answer questions and understand cases." To Henry James, June 12, 1869. [52] Ephraim W. Gurney and T. S. Perry. [53] It ought perhaps to be noted, even if only to dismiss the subject and prevent misapprehension, that at about this time a man whose philosophic ability was great and whose thought was vigorously materialistic was often at the house in Quincy Street. This was Chauncey Wright. He was twelve years James's senior; a man whose best work was done in conversation--who wrote little, and whose talents are now to be measured chiefly by the strong impression that he made on some of his contemporaries. "Of the two motives to which philosophic systems owe their being, the craving for consistency or unity in thought, and the desire for a solid outward warrant for our emotional ends, his mind was dominated only by the former. Never in a human head was contemplation more separated from desire." (_Vide_ James's obituary notice of Wright, contributed to the _Nation_ for Sept. 23, 1875.) It has been suggested that Wright influenced James's thinking. If so, his influence was not lasting and, in the opinion of the editor, can easily be overstated. James was not limited to any one philosophic companionship even at this time; and if he felt Wright's influence, it is remarkable that there should be no mention of him in any of the letters or memoranda that have survived and that there was never any acknowledgment in James's subsequent writings. He was ever inclined to make acknowledgment, even to his opponents. [54] _Cf._ the description of Henry James, Senior's, home-comings in _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 72. [55] The early history of experimental psychology in America once occasioned discussion. But the discussion seems to have arisen from its being assumed that some particular formality or event should be recognized as marking the coming into being, or the coming of age, of a "Department" or a "Laboratory." James has stated the facts as to the history of the Harvard Laboratory in his own words: "I, myself, 'founded' the instruction in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1874-5, or 1876, I forget which. For a long series of years the laboratory was in two rooms of the Scientific School building, which at last became choked with apparatus, so that a change was necessary. I then, in 1890, resolved on an altogether new departure, raised several thousand dollars, fitted up Dane Hall, and introduced laboratory exercises as a regular part of the undergraduate psychology course."--_Vide Science_, (N. S.) vol. II, pp. 626, 735. Also, p. 301 _infra_. [56] The name of a rocky promontory near Newport. [57] Being and Non-Being. [58] _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_, vol. XVIII, p. 631 (June, 1910). [59] "The only decent thing I have ever written" appeared in _Mind_ under the title "The Sentiment of Rationality." A footnote (p. 346) ran as follows: "This article is the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize. It deals with the purely theoretic or logical impulse. Other chapters treat of practical and emotional motives, and in the conclusion an attempt is made to use the motives as tests of the soundness of different philosophies." [60] "The Spatial Quale," _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, 1879, vol. XIII, p. 64. [61] Bastien-Lepage's Les Foins (The Hay-Makers). [62] _Vide_ Introduction, p. 9 _supra_. [63] That I was intimate with their writings and did not wish to leave Prague without exchanging a few words with them. [64] Loquacity. [65] Service is service. [66] The true names of three compatriots, who may be living, are not given. [67] "My tour in Germany was pleasant, and from the pedagogic point of view instructive; although its chief result was to make me more satisfied than ever with our Harvard College methods of teaching, and to make me feel that in America we have perhaps a more cosmopolitan post of observation than is elsewhere to be found." To Renouvier, Dec. 18, 1882. [68] See p. 179 _supra_, and note. [69] See an unsigned review of Epes Sargent's "Planchette," in the Boston _Advertiser_ of March 10, 1869. "The present attitude of society on this whole question is as extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable to the pretension of an age which prides itself on enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge.... The phenomena seem, in their present state, to pertain more to the sphere of the disinterested student of nature than to that of the ordinary layman." The review was reprinted in _Collected Essays and Reviews_. [70] As an example of this James once quoted Huxley: "I take no interest in the subject. The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have had the opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. But supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a séance." _Life and Letters_, vol. I, p. 452 (New York, 1900). James's comment should be added: "Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two whole-souled categories, namely, revelation or imposture, to apperceive the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages, he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow; therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture. The odd point is that so few of those who talk in this way realize that they and the spiritists are using the same major premise and differing only in the minor. The major premise is: 'Any spirit-revelation must be romantic.' The minor of the spiritist is: 'This _is_ romantic'; that of the Huxleyan is: 'This is dingy twaddle'--whence their opposite conclusions!" (_Memories and Studies_, pp. 185, 186.) [71] _The Will to Believe_, etc., p. 302. [72] _Cf._ _The Will to Believe_, etc., p. 319. [73] It is not the province of this book to estimate the importance of the work done by James and the other men--Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Richet, to go no further--who supported and guided the S. P. R. It must be traced in the literature of automatisms, hypnosis, divided personality, and the "subliminal." In James's own writings the reader may be referred to the above named chapter of _The Will to Believe_, etc., two papers included in _Memories and Studies_, and a review of Myers's _Human Personality_ in Proc. of the (Eng.) S. P. R., vol. XVIII, p. 22 (1903). See also p. 306 _infra_, and note. [74] _Mind_, 1884, vol. IX, pp. 1-26. [75] _Unitarian Review_, Dec., 1883; vol. XX, p. 481. [76] "The Dilemma of Determinism." _Unitarian Review_, Sept., 1884. Republished in _The Will to Believe and Other Essays_. [77] Professor Howison had accepted an appointment at the University of California (Berkeley). [78] "Why so heartlessly deceive your sons?" LEOPARDI, _To Sylvia_. [79] From 15 Appian Way to 18 Garden Street. [80] "It's amusing to see how, even upon my microscopic field, minute events are perpetually taking place illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature. Yesterday Nurse and I had a good laugh, but I must allow that decidedly she 'had' me. I was thinking of something that interested me very much, and my mind was suddenly flooded by one of those luminous waves that sweep out of consciousness all but the living sense, and overpower one with joy in the rich, throbbing complexity of life, when suddenly I looked up at Nurse, who was dressing me, and saw her primitive, rudimentary expression (so common here), as of no inherited quarrel with her destiny of putting petticoats over my head; the poverty and deadness of it, contrasted to the tide of speculation that was coursing through my brain, made me exclaim, 'Oh, Nurse, don't you wish you were inside of _me_?' Her look of dismay, and vehement disclaimer--'Inside of you, Miss, when you have just had a sick-headache for five days!'--gave a greater blow to my vanity than that much-battered article has ever received. The headache had gone off in the night and I had clean forgotten it when the little wretch confronted me with it, at this sublime moment, when I was feeling within me the potency of a Bismarck, and left me powerless before the immutable law that, however great we may seem to our own consciousness, no human being would exchange his for ours, and before the fact that _my_ glorious rôle was to stand for _sick-headache_ to mankind! What a grotesque being I am, to be sure, lying in this room, with the resistance of a thistle-down, having illusory moments of throbbing with the pulse of the race, the mystery to be solved at the next breath, and the fountain of all happiness within me--the sense of vitality, in short, simply proportionate to the excess of weakness. To sit by and watch these absurdities is amusing in its way, and reminds me of how I used to _listen_ to my 'company manners' in the days when I had 'em, and how ridiculous they sounded. "Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! _Are_ they unhappy, by the way?" [From a diary of Alice James's.] [81] Whose picture used to adorn the numerous advertisements of a patent medicine called "Mrs. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound." [82] The state of self-reproachful irritation described by _Kater-Gefühl_ cannot be justly rendered by any English word. [83] Outbursts. [84] Mediatory attitude (view). [85] "The Perception of Space." _Mind_, 1887; vol. XII, pp. 1-30, 183-211, 321-353, 516-548. [86] _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, 1886, vol. XX, p. 374. [87] Epochmaking manifestation. [88] I send her heartiest greetings. [89] From pure. [90] If it was printed, this notice has escaped identification. [91] "How I shall miss that man's presence in the world!... Our problems were the same and for the most part our solutions." "He is a terrible loss to me. I didn't know till the news came how much I mentally referred to him as a critic and sympathizer, or how much I counted on seeing more of him hereafter." (From letters to G. Croom Robertson.) _Vide_, also, _The Will to Believe_, etc., pp. 306-7. [92] _Vide_, pp. 290-91 _infra_. [93] "I write every morning at one of the card tables in the parlor, all alone in a room 120 feet long--just about the right size for one man." (Letter from the Hotel Del Monte, Sept. 8, 1898.) [94] J. M. Cattell. Address upon the 25th Anniversary of the American Psychological Association, Dec. 1916. _Science_ (N.S.), vol. XLV, p. 276. [95] To Hugo Münsterberg, Aug. 22, 1890. [96] _E.g._, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, p. 369. "One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime state of mind and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and the same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented to happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's throats, houses turn inside out, old women become young men, everything 'passes into its opposite' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so, in the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one) must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'transcended' and identified by miracles, ere the proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show." [97] "What Psychical Research has Accomplished," was first published in _The Forum_, 1892, vol. XIII, p. 727. [98] It will be recalled that Mrs. Whitman had been a Baltimorean before she came to live in Boston. [99] _Aug. 14._ "Lowell's funeral at mid-day.... Went to Child's to say good-bye, and found Walcott, Howells, Cranch, etc. Poor dear old Child! We drank a glass standing to the hope of seeing Lowell again." [100] Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sedgwick. Mr. Sedgwick was Miss Ashburner's nephew. [101] See vol. II, p. 39 _infra_. [102] See "The Galileo Festival at Padua": _Nation_ (New York), Jan. 5, 1893; a four-column account of the Festival. [103] _Philosophical Review_ (1893), vol. II, p. 213 [104] Mr. Frank Duveneck, painter and sculptor, now of Cincinnati. [105] Mr. Duveneck was Mr. Boott's son-in-law. _Vide_ page 153 _supra_. [106] Jan. 24, '94. To Carl Stumpf. "One should not be a cosmopolitan, one's soul becomes 'disintegrated,' as Janet would say. Parts of it remain in different places, and the whole of it is nowhere. One's native land seems foreign. It is not wholly a good thing, and I think I suffer from it." 
38091	----	THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [Illustration: WILLIAM JAMES FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1895] THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES EDITED BY HIS SON HENRY JAMES IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME II [Illustration] THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HENRY JAMES CONTENTS XI. 1893-1899 1-52 _Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular Lecturing--Chautauqua._ LETTERS:-- To Dickinson S. Miller 17 To Henry Holt 19 To Henry James 20 To Henry James 20 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 20 To G. H. Howison 22 To Theodore Flournoy 23 To his Daughter 25 To E. L. Godkin 28 To F. W. H. Myers 30 To F. W. H. Myers 32 To Henry Holt 33 To his Class at Radcliffe College 33 To Henry James 34 To Henry James 36 To Benjamin P. Blood 38 To Mrs. James 40 To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 44 To Charles Renouvier 44 To Theodore Flournoy 46 To Dickinson S. Miller 48 To Henry James 51 XII. 1893-1899 (Continued) 53-91 _The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks._ LETTERS:-- To Theodore Flournoy 53 To Henry W. Rankin 56 To Benjamin P. Blood 58 To Henry James 60 To Miss Ellen Emmet 62 To E. L. Godkin 64 To F. C. S. Schiller 65 To James J. Putnam 66 To James J. Putnam 72 To François Pillon 73 To Mrs. James 75 To G. H. Howison 79 To Henry James 80 To his Son Alexander 81 To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 82 To Dickinson S. Miller 84 To Dickinson S. Miller 86 To Henry Rutgers Marshall 86 To Henry Rutgers Marshall 88 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 88 XIII. 1899-1902 92-170 _Two Years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures._ LETTERS:-- To Miss Pauline Goldmark 95 To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens 96 To William M. Salter 99 To Miss Frances R. Morse 102 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 103 To Thomas Davidson 106 To John C. Gray 108 To Miss Frances R. Morse 109 To Mrs. Glendower Evans 112 To Dickinson S. Miller 115 To Francis Boott 117 To Hugo Münsterberg 119 To G. H. Palmer 120 To Miss Frances R. Morse 124 To his Son Alexander 129 To his Daughter 130 To Miss Frances R. Morse 133 To Miss Frances R. Morse 133 To Josiah Royce 135 To Miss Frances R. Morse 138 To James Sully 140 To Miss Frances R. Morse 142 To F. C. S. Schiller 142 To Miss Frances R. Morse 143 To Miss Frances R. Morse 146 To Henry W. Rankin 148 To Charles Eliot Norton 150 To N. S. Shaler 153 To Miss Frances R. Morse 155 To Henry James 159 To E. L. Godkin 159 To E. L. Godkin 161 To Miss Pauline Goldmark 162 To H. N. Gardiner 164 To F. C. S. Schiller 164 To Charles Eliot Norton 166 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 167 XIV. 1902-1905 171-218 _The Last Period (I)--Statements of Religious Belief--Philosophical Writing._ LETTERS:-- To Henry L. Higginson 173 To Miss Grace Norton 173 To Miss Frances R. Morse 175 To Henry L. Higginson 176 To Henri Bergson 178 To Mrs. Louis Agassiz 180 To Henry L. Higginson 182 To Henri Bergson 183 To Theodore Flournoy 185 To Henry James 188 To his Daughter 192 To Miss Frances R. Morse 193 To Henry James 195 To Henry W. Rankin 196 To Dickinson S. Miller 197 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 198 To Miss Frances R. Morse 200 To Mrs. Henry Whitman 201 To Henry James 202 To François Pillon 203 To Henry James 204 To Charles Eliot Norton 206 To L. T. Hobhouse 207 To Edwin D. Starbuck 209 To James Henry Leuba 211 Answers to the Pratt Questionnaire on Religious Belief 212 To Miss Pauline Goldmark 215 To F. C. S. Schiller 216 To F. J. E. Woodbridge 217 To Edwin D. Starbuck 217 To F. J. E. Woodbridge 218 XV. 1905-1907 219-282 _The Last Period (II)--Italy and Greece--Philosophical Congress in Rome--Stanford University--The Earthquake--Resignation of Professorship._ LETTERS:-- To Mrs. James 221 To his Daughter 223 To Mrs. James 225 To George Santayana 228 To Mrs. James 229 To Mrs. James 230 To H. G. Wells 230 To Henry L. Higginson 231 To T. S. Perry 232 To Dickinson S. Miller 233 To Dickinson S. Miller 235 To Dickinson S. Miller 237 To Daniel Merriman 238 To Miss Pauline Goldmark 238 To Henry James 239 To Theodore Flournoy 241 To F. C. S. Schiller 245 To Miss Frances R. Morse 247 To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 250 To W. Lutoslawski 252 To John Jay Chapman 255 To Henry James 258 To H. G. Wells 259 To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 260 To his Daughter 262 To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 263 To Moorfield Storey 265 To Theodore Flournoy 266 To Charles A. Strong 268 To F. C. S. Schiller 270 To Clifford W. Beers 273 To William James, Jr. 275 To Henry James 277 To F. C. S. Schiller 280 XVI. 1907-1909 283-332 _The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report._ LETTERS:-- To Charles Lewis Slattery 287 To Henry L. Higginson 288 To W. Cameron Forbes 288 To F. C. S. Schiller 290 To Henri Bergson 290 To T. S. Perry 294 To Dickinson S. Miller 295 To Miss Pauline Goldmark 296 To W. Jerusalem 297 To Henry James 298 To Theodore Flournoy 300 To Norman Kemp Smith 301 To his Daughter 301 To Henry James 302 To Henry James 303 To Miss Pauline Goldmark 303 To Charles Eliot Norton 306 To Henri Bergson 308 To John Dewey 310 To Theodore Flournoy 310 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 312 To Theodore Flournoy 313 To Henri Bergson 315 To H. G. Wells 316 To Henry James 317 To T. S. Perry 318 To Hugo Münsterberg 320 To John Jay Chapman 321 To G. H. Palmer 322 To Theodore Flournoy 322 To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 324 To F. C. S. Schiller 325 To Theodore Flournoy 326 To Shadworth H. Hodgson 328 To John Jay Chapman 329 To John Jay Chapman 330 To John Jay Chapman 330 To Dickinson S. Miller 331 XVII. 1910 333-350 _Final Months--The End._ LETTERS:-- To Henry L. Higginson 334 To Miss Frances R. Morse 335 To T. S. Perry 335 To François Pillon 336 To Theodore Flournoy 338 To his Daughter 338 To Henry P. Bowditch 341 To François Pillon 342 To Henry Adams 344 To Henry Adams 346 To Henry Adams 347 To Benjamin P. Blood 347 To Theodore Flournoy 349 APPENDIX I. 353 Three Criticisms for Students. APPENDIX II. 357 Books by William James. INDEX 363 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS William James in middle life _Frontispiece_ "Damn the Absolute": two snapshots of William James and Josiah Royce 135 William James and Henry James posing for a kodak in 1900 161 William James and Henry Clement at the "Putnam Shanty" in the Adirondacks (1907?) 315 Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams 347 THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES XI 1893-1899 _Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular Lecturing--Chautauqua_ When James returned from Europe, he was fifty-two years old. If he had been another man, he might have settled down to the intensive cultivation of the field in which he had already achieved renown and influence. He would then have spent the rest of his life in working out special problems in psychology, in deducing a few theories, in making particular applications of his conclusions, in administering a growing laboratory, in surrounding himself with assistants and disciples--in weeding and gathering where he had tilled. But the fact was that the publication of his two books on psychology operated for him as a welcome release from the subject. He had no illusion of finality about what he had written.[1] But he would have said that whatever original contribution he was capable of making to psychology had already been made; that he must pass on and leave addition and revision to others. He gradually disencumbered himself of responsibility for teaching the subject in the College. The laboratory had already been placed under Professor Münsterberg's charge. For one year, during which Münsterberg returned to Germany, James was compelled to direct its conduct; but he let it be known that he would resign his professorship rather than concern himself with it indefinitely. Readers of this book will have seen that the centre of his interest had always been religious and philosophical. To be sure, the currents by which science was being carried forward during the sixties and seventies had supported him in his distrust of conclusions based largely on introspection and _a priori_ reasoning. As early as 1865 he had said, apropos of Agassiz, "No one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends." In the spirit of that remark he had spent years on brain-physiology, on the theory of the emotions, on the feeling of effort in mental processes, in studying the measurements and exact experiments by means of which the science of the mind was being brought into quickening relation with the physical and biological sciences. But all the while he had been driven on by a curiosity that embraced ulterior problems. In half of the field of his consciousness questions had been stirring which now held his attention completely. Does consciousness really exist? Could a radically empirical conception of the universe be formulated? What is knowledge? What truth? Where is freedom? and where is there room for faith? Metaphysical problems haunted his mind; discussions that ran in strictly psychological channels bored him. He called psychology "a nasty little subject," according to Professor Palmer, and added, "all one cares to know lies outside." He would not consider spending time on a revised edition of his textbook (the "Briefer Course") except for a bribe that was too great ever to be urged upon him. As time went on, he became more and more irritated at being addressed or referred to as a "psychologist." In June, 1903, when he became aware that Harvard was intending to confer an honorary degree on him, he went about for days before Commencement in a half-serious state of dread lest, at the fatal moment, he should hear President Eliot's voice naming him "Psychologist, psychical researcher, willer-to-believe, religious experiencer." He could not say whether the impossible last epithets would be less to his taste than "psychologist." Only along the borderland between normal and pathological mental states, and particularly in the region of "religious experience," did he continue to collect psychological data and to explore them. The new subjects which he offered at Harvard during the nineties are indicative of the directions in which his mind was moving. In the first winter after his return he gave a course on Cosmology, which he had never taught before and which he described in the department announcement as "a study of the fundamental conceptions of natural science with especial reference to the theories of evolution and materialism," and for the first time announced that his graduate "seminar" would be wholly devoted to questions in mental pathology "embracing a review of the principal forms of abnormal or exceptional mental life." In 1895 the second half of his psychological seminar was announced as "a discussion of certain theoretic problems, as Consciousness, Knowledge, Self, the relations of Mind and Body." In 1896 he offered a course on the philosophy of Kant for the first time. In 1898 the announcement of his "elective" on Metaphysics explained that the class would consider "the unity or pluralism of the world ground, and its knowability or unknowability; realism and idealism, freedom, teleology and theism."[2] But there is another aspect of the nineties which must be touched upon. After getting back "to harness" in 1893 James took up, not only his full college duties, but an amount of outside lecturing such as he had never done before. In so doing he overburdened himself and postponed the attainment of his true purpose; but the temptation to accept the requests which now poured in on him was made irresistible by practical considerations. He not only repeated some of his Harvard courses at Radcliffe College, and gave instruction in the Harvard Summer School in addition to the regular work of the term; but delivered lectures at teachers' meetings and before other special audiences in places as far from Cambridge as Colorado and California. A number of the papers that are included in "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy" (1897) and "Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's Ideals" (1897) were thus prepared as lectures. Some of them were read many times before they were published. When he stopped for a rest in 1899, he was exhausted to the verge of a formidable break-down. Even a glance at this period tempts one to wonder whether this record would not have been richer if it had been different. Might-have-beens can never be measured or verified; and yet sometimes it cannot be doubted that possibilities never realized were actual possibilities once. By 1893 James was inwardly eager, as has already been said, to devote all his thought and working time to metaphysical and religious questions. More than that--he had already conceived the important terms of his own _Welt-anschauung_. "The Will to Believe" was written by 1896. In the preface to the "Talks to Teachers" he said of the essay called "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "it connects itself with a definite view of the World and our Moral relations to the same.... I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy." This was no more than a statement of a general philosophic attitude which had for some years been familiar to his students and to readers of his occasional papers. The lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," delivered at the University of California in 1898, forecast "Pragmatism" and the "Meaning of Truth." If his time and energy had not been otherwise consumed, the nineties might well have witnessed the appearance of papers which were not written until the next decade. If he had been able to apply an undistracted attention to what his spirit was all the while straining toward, the disastrous breakdown of 1899-1902 might not have happened. But instead, these best years of his maturity were largely sacrificed to the practical business of supporting his family. His salary as a Harvard professor was insufficient to his needs. On his salary alone he could not educate his four children as he wanted to, and make provision for his old age and their future and his wife's, except by denying himself movement and social and professional contacts and by withdrawing into isolation that would have been utterly paralyzing and depressing to his genius. He possessed private means, to be sure; but, considering his family, these amounted to no more than a partial insurance against accident and a moderate supplement to his salary. His books had not yet begun to yield him a substantial increase of income. It is true that he made certain lecture engagements serve as the occasion for casting philosophical conceptions in more or less popular form, and that he frequently paid the expenses of refreshing travels by means of these lectures. But after he had economized in every direction,--as for instance, by giving up horse and hired man at Chocorua,--the bald fact remained that for six years he spent most of the time that he could spare from regular college duties, and about all his vacations, in carrying the fruits of the previous fifteen years of psychological work into the popular market. His public reputation was increased thereby. Teachers, audiences, and the "general reader" had reason to be thankful. But science and philosophy paid for the gain. His case was no worse than that of plenty of other men of productive genius who were enmeshed in an inadequately supported academic system. It would have been much more distressing under the conditions that prevail today. So James took the limitations of the situation as a matter of course and made no complaint. But when he died, the systematic statement of his philosophy had not been "rounded out" and he knew that he was leaving it "too much like an arch built only on one side." * * * * * James's appearance at this period is well shown by the frontispiece of this volume. Almost anyone who was at Harvard in the nineties can recall him as he went back and forth in Kirkland Street between the College and his Irving Street house, and can in memory see again that erect figure walking with a step that was somehow firm and light without being particularly rapid, two or three thick volumes and a note-book under one arm, and on his face a look of abstraction that used suddenly to give way to an expression of delighted and friendly curiosity. Sometimes it was an acquaintance who caught his eye and received a cordial word; sometimes it was an occurrence in the street that arrested him; sometimes the terrier dog, who had been roving along unwatched and forgotten, embroiled himself in an adventure or a fight and brought James out of his thoughts. One day he would have worn the Norfolk jacket that he usually worked in at home to his lecture-room; the next, he would have forgotten to change the black coat that he had put on for a formal occasion. At twenty minutes before nine in the morning he could usually be seen going to the College Chapel for the fifteen-minute service with which the College day began. If he was returning home for lunch, he was likely to be hurrying; for he had probably let himself be detained after a lecture to discuss some question with a few of his class. He was apt then to have some student with him whom he was bringing home to lunch and to finish the discussion at the family table, or merely for the purpose of establishing more personal relations than were possible in the class-room. At the end of the afternoon, or in the early evening, he would frequently be bicycling or walking again. He would then have been working until his head was tired, and would have laid his spectacles down on his desk and have started out again to get a breath of air and perhaps to drop in on a Cambridge neighbor. In his own house it seemed as if he was always at work; all the more, perhaps, because it was obvious that he possessed no instinct for arranging his day and protecting himself from interruptions. He managed reasonably well to keep his mornings clear; or rather he allowed his wife to stand guard over them with fair success. But soon after he had taken an essential after-lunch nap, he was pretty sure to be "caught" by callers and visitors. From six o'clock on, he usually had one or two of the children sitting, more or less subdued, in the library, while he himself read or dashed off letters, or (if his eyes were tired) dictated them to Mrs. James. He always had letters and post-cards to write. At any odd time--with his overcoat on and during a last moment before hurrying off to an appointment or a train--he would sit down at his desk and do one more note or card--always in the beautiful and flowing hand that hardly changed between his eighteenth and his sixty-eighth years. He seemed to feel no need of solitude except when he was reading technical literature or writing philosophy. If other members of the household were talking and laughing in the room that adjoined his study, he used to keep the door open and occasionally pop in for a word, or to talk for a quarter of an hour. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mrs. James finally persuaded him to let the door be closed up. He never struck an equilibrium between wishing to see his students and neighbors freely and often, and wishing not to be interrupted by even the most agreeable reminder of the existence of anyone or anything outside the matter in which he was absorbed. It was customary for each member of the Harvard Faculty to announce in the college catalogue at what hour of the day he could be consulted by students. Year after year James assigned the hour of his evening meal for such calls. Sometimes he left the table to deal with the caller in private; sometimes a student, who had pretty certainly eaten already and was visibly abashed at finding himself walking in on a second dinner, would be brought into the dining-room and made to talk about other things than his business. He allowed his conscience to be constantly burdened with a sense of obligation to all sorts of people. The list of neighbors, students, strangers visiting Cambridge, to whom he and Mrs. James felt responsible for civilities, was never closed, and the cordiality which animated his intentions kept him reminded of every one on it. And yet, whenever his wife wisely prepared for a suitable time and made engagements for some sort of hospitality otherwise than by hap-hazard, it was perversely likely to be the case, when the appointed hour arrived, that James was "going on his nerves" and in no mood for "being entertaining." The most comradely of men, nothing galled him like _having to be_ sociable. The "hollow mockery of our social conventions" would then be described in furious and lurid speech. Luckily the guests were not yet there to hear him. But they did not always get away without catching a glimpse of his state of mind. On one such occasion,--an evening reception for his graduate class had been arranged,--Mrs. James encountered a young man in the hall whose expression was so perturbed that she asked him what had happened to him. "I've come in again," he replied, "to get my hat. I was trying to find my way to the dining-room when Mr. James swooped at me and said, 'Here, Smith, you want to get out of this _Hell_, don't you? I'll show you how. There!' And before I could answer, he'd popped me out through a back-door. But, really, I do not want to go!" The dinners of a club to which allusions will occur in this volume, (in letters to Henry L. Higginson, T. S. Perry, and John C. Gray) were occasions apart from all others; for James could go to them at the last moment, without any sense of responsibility and knowing that he would find congenial company and old friends. So he continued to go to these dinners, even after he had stopped accepting all invitations to dine. The Club (for it never had any name) had been started in 1870. James had been one of the original group who agreed to dine together once a month during the winter. Among the other early members had been his brother Henry, W. D. Howells, O. W. Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, John C. Gray, Henry Adams, T. S. Perry, John C. Ropes, A. G. Sedgwick, and F. Parkman. The more faithful diners, who constituted the nucleus of the Club during the later years, included Henry L. Higginson, Sturgis Bigelow, John C. Ropes, John T. Morse, Charles Grinnell, James Ford Rhodes, Moorfield Storey, James W. Crafts, and H. P. Walcott. * * * * * Every little while James's sleep would "go to pieces," and he would go off to Newport, the Adirondacks, or elsewhere, for a few days. This happened both summer and winter. It was not the effect of the place or climate in which he was living, but simply that his dangerously high average of nervous tension had been momentarily raised to the snapping point. Writing was almost certain to bring on this result. When he had an essay or a lecture to prepare, he could not do it by bits. In order to begin such a task, he tried to seize upon a free day--more often a Sunday than any other. Then he would shut himself into his library, or disappear into a room at the top of the house, and remain hidden all day. If things went well, twenty or thirty sheets of much-corrected manuscript (about twenty-five hundred words in his free hand) might result from such a day. As many more would have gone into the waste-basket. Two or three successive days of such writing "took it out of him" visibly. Short holidays, or intervals in college lecturing, were often employed for writing in this way, the longer vacations of the latter nineties being filled, as has been said, with traveling and lecture engagements. In the intervals there would be a few days, or sometimes two or three whole weeks, at Chocorua. Or, one evening, all the windows of the deserted Irving Street house would suddenly be wide open to the night air, and passers on the sidewalk could see James sitting in his shirt-sleeves within the circle of the bright light that stood on his library table. He was writing letters, making notes, and skirmishing through the piles of journals and pamphlets that had accumulated during an absence. * * * * * The impression which he made on a student who sat under him in several classes shortly before the date at which this volume begins have been set down in a form in which they can be given here. "I have a vivid recollection" (writes Dr. Dickinson S. Miller) "of James's lectures, classes, conferences, seminars, laboratory interests, and the side that students saw of him generally. Fellow-manliness seemed to me a good name for his quality. The one thing apparently impossible to him was to speak _ex cathedra_ from heights of scientific erudition and attainment. There were not a few 'if's' and 'maybe's' in his remarks. Moreover he seldom followed for long an orderly system of argument or unfolding of a theory, but was always apt to puncture such systematic pretensions when in the midst of them with some entirely unaffected doubt or question that put the matter upon a basis of common sense at once. He had drawn from his laboratory experience in chemistry and his study of medicine a keen sense that the imposing formulas of science that impress laymen are not so 'exact' as they sound. He was not, in my time at least, much of a believer in lecturing in the sense of continuous exposition. "I can well remember the first meeting of the course in psychology in 1890, in a ground-floor room of the old Lawrence Scientific School. He took a considerable part of the hour by reading extracts from Henry Sidgwick's Lecture against Lecturing, proceeding to explain that we should use as a textbook his own 'Principles of Psychology,' appearing for the first time that very week from the press, and should spend the hours in conference, in which we should discuss and ask questions, on both sides. So during the year's course we read the two volumes through, with some amount of running commentary and controversy. There were four or five men of previous psychological training in a class of (I think) between twenty and thirty, two of whom were disposed to take up cudgels for the British associational psychology and were particularly troubled by the repeated doctrine of the 'Principles' that a state of consciousness had no parts or elements, but was one indivisible fact. He bore questions that really were criticisms with inexhaustible patience and what I may call (the subject invites the word often) _human_ attention; invited written questions as well, and would often return them with a reply penciled on the back when he thought the discussion too special in interest to be pursued before the class. Moreover, he bore with us with never a sign of impatience if we lingered after class, and even walked up Kirkland Street with him on his way home. Yet he was really not argumentative, not inclined to dialectic or pertinacious debate of any sort. It must always have required an effort of self-control to put up with it. He almost never, even in private conversation, contended for his own opinion. He had a way of often falling back on the language of perception, insight, sensibility, vision of possibilities. I recall how on one occasion after class, as I parted with him at the gate of the Memorial Hall triangle, his last words were something like these: 'Well, Miller, that theory's not a warm reality to me yet--still a cold conception'; and the charm of the comradely smile with which he said it! The disinclination to formal logical system and the more prolonged purely intellectual analyses was felt by some men as a lack in his classroom work, though they recognized that these analyses were present in the 'Psychology.' On the other hand, the very tendency to _feel_ ideas lent a kind of emotional or æsthetic color which deepened the interest. "In the course of the year he asked the men each to write some word of suggestion, if he were so inclined, for improvement in the method with which the course was conducted; and, if I remember rightly, there were not a few respectful suggestions that too much time was allowed to the few wrangling disputants. In a pretty full and varied experience of lecture-rooms at home and abroad I cannot recall another where the class was asked to criticize the methods of the lecturer. "Another class of twelve or fourteen, in the same year, on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, met in one of the 'tower rooms' of Sever Hall, sitting around a table. Here we had to do mostly with pure metaphysics. And more striking still was the prominence of humanity and sensibility in his way of taking philosophic problems. I can see him now, sitting at the head of that heavy table of light-colored oak near the bow-window that formed the end of the room. My brother, a visitor at Cambridge, dropping in for an hour and seeing him with his vigorous air, bronzed and sanguine complexion, and brown tweeds, said, 'He looks more like a sportsman than a professor.' I think that the sporting men in college always felt a certain affinity to themselves on one side in the freshness and manhood that distinguished him in mind, appearance, and diction. It was, by the way, in this latter course that I first heard some of the philosophic phrases now identified with him. There was a great deal about the monist and pluralist views of the universe. The world of the monist was described as a 'block-universe' and the monist himself as 'wallowing in a sense of unbridled unity,' or something of the sort. He always wanted the men to write one or two 'theses' in the course of the year and to get to work early on them. He made a great deal of bibliography. He would say, 'I am no man for editions and references, no exact bibliographer.' But none the less he would put upon the blackboard full lists of books, English, French, German, and Italian, on our subject. His own reading was immense and systematic. No one has ever done justice to it, partly because he spoke with unaffected modesty of that side of his equipment. "Of course this knowledge came to the foreground in his 'seminar.' In my second year I was with him in one of these for both terms, the first half-year studying the psychology of pleasure and pain, and the second, mental pathology. Here each of us undertook a special topic, the reading for which was suggested by him. The students were an interesting group, including Professor Santayana, then an instructor, Dr. Herbert Nichols, Messrs. Mezes (now President of the City College, New York), Pierce (late Professor at Smith College), Angell (Professor of Psychology at Chicago, and now President of the Carnegie Corporation), Bakewell (Professor at Yale), and Alfred Hodder (who became instructor at Bryn Mawr College, then abandoned academic life for literature and politics). In this seminar I was deeply impressed by his judicious and often judicial quality. His range of intellectual experience, his profound cultivation in literature, in science and in art (has there been in our generation a more cultivated man?), his absolutely unfettered and untrammeled mind, ready to do sympathetic justice to the most unaccredited, audacious, or despised hypotheses, yet always keeping his own sense of proportion and the balance of evidence--merely to know these qualities, as we sat about that council-board, was to receive, so far as we were capable of absorbing it, in a heightened sense of the good old adjective, 'liberal' education. Of all the services he did us in this seminar perhaps the greatest was his running commentary on the students' reports on such authors as Lombroso and Nordau, and all theories of degeneracy and morbid human types. His thought was that there is no sharp line to be drawn between 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' minds, that all have something of both. Once when we were returning from two insane asylums which he had arranged for the class to visit, and at one of which we had seen a dangerous, almost naked maniac, I remember his saying, 'President Eliot might not like to admit that there is no sharp line between himself and the men we have just seen, but it is true.' He would emphasize that people who had great nervous burdens to carry, hereditary perhaps, could order their lives fruitfully and perhaps derive some gain from their 'degenerate' sensitiveness, whatever it might be. The doctrine is set forth with regard to religion in an early chapter of his 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' but for us it was applied to life at large. "In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a vigor, a freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met on the way, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on the way to my class in trepidation!' "Professor Royce's style of exposition was continuous, even, unfailing, composed. Professor James was more conversational, varied, broken, at times struggling for expression--in spite of what has been mentioned as his mastery of words. This was natural, for the one was deeply and comfortably installed in a theory (to be sure a great theory), and the other was peering out in quest of something greater which he did not distinctly see. James's method gave us in the classroom more of his own exploration and _aperçu_. We felt his mind at work. "Royce in lecturing sat immovable. James would rise with a peculiar suddenness and make bold and rapid strokes for a diagram on the black-board--I can remember his abstracted air as he wrestled with some idea, standing by his chair with one foot upon it, elbow on knee, hand to chin. A friend has described a scene at a little class that, in a still earlier year, met in James's own study. In the effort to illustrate he brought out a black-board. He stood it on a chair and in various other positions, but could not at once write upon it, hold it steady, and keep it in the class's vision. Entirely bent on what he was doing, his efforts resulted at last in his standing it on the floor while he lay down at full length, holding it with one hand, drawing with the other, and continuing the flow of his commentary. I can myself remember how, after one of his lectures on Pragmatism in the Horace Mann Auditorium in New York, being assailed with questions by people who came up to the edge of the platform, he ended by sitting on that edge himself, all in his frock-coat as he was, his feet hanging down, with his usual complete absorption in the subject, and the look of human and mellow consideration which distinguished him at such moments, meeting the thoughts of the inquirers, whose attention also was entirely riveted. If this suggests a lack of dignity, it misleads, for dignity never forsook him, such was the inherent strength of tone and bearing. In one respect these particular lectures (afterwards published as his book on Pragmatism) stand alone in my recollection. An audience may easily be large the first time, but if there is a change it usually falls away more or less on the subsequent occasions. These lectures were announced for one of the larger lecture-halls. This was so crowded before the lecture began, some not being able to gain admittance, that the audience had to be asked to move to the large 'auditorium' I have mentioned. But in it also the numbers grew, till on the last day it presented much the same appearance as the other hall on the first." _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Nov._ 19, 1893. MY DEAR MILLER,--I have found the work of recommencing teaching unexpectedly formidable after our year of gentlemanly irresponsibility. I seem to have forgotten everything, especially psychology, and the subjects themselves have become so paltry and insignificant-seeming that each lecture has appeared a ghastly farce. Of late things are getting more real; but the experience brings startlingly near to one the wild desert of old-age which lies ahead, and makes me feel like impressing on all chicken-professors like you the paramount urgency of providing for the time when you'll be old fogies, by laying by from your very first year of service a fund on which you may be enabled to "retire" before you're sixty and incapable of any cognitive operation that wasn't ground into you twenty years before, or of any emotion save bewilderment and jealousy of the thinkers of the rising generation. I am glad to hear that you have more writings on the stocks. I read your paper on "Truth and Error" with bewilderment and jealousy. Either it is Dr. Johnson _redivivus_ striking the earth with his stick and saying, "Matter exists and there's an end on 't," or it is a new David Hume, reincarnated in your form, and so subtle in his simplicity that a decaying mind like mine fails to seize any of the deeper import of his words. The trouble is, I can't tell which it is. But with the help of God I will go at it again this winter, when I settle down to my final bout with Royce's theory, which must result in my either _actively_ becoming a propagator thereof, or actively its enemy and destroyer. It is high time that this more decisive attitude were generated in me, and it ought to take place this winter. I hardly see more of my colleagues this winter than I did last year. Each of us lies in his burrow, and we meet on the street. Münsterberg is going really _splendidly_ and the Laboratory is a bower of delight. But I do not work there. Royce is in powerful condition.... Yours ever, W. J. Although, in the next letter, James poked fun at reformed spelling, he was really in sympathy with the movement to which his correspondent was giving an outspoken support--as Mr. Holt of course understood. "Isn't it abominable"--Professor Palmer has quoted James as exclaiming--"that everybody is expected to spell the same way!" He lent his name to Mr. Carnegie's simplified spelling program, and used to wax honestly indignant when people opposed spelling reform with purely conservative arguments. He cared little about etymology, and saw clearly enough that mere accident and fashion have helped to determine orthography. But in his own writing he never put himself to great pains to reëducate his reflexes. He let his hand write _through_ as often as _thro'_ or _thru_, and only occasionally bethought him to write 'filosofy' and 'telefone.' When he published, the text of his books showed very few reforms. _To Henry Holt._ Cambridge, _March_ 27[1894]. _Autographically written, and spelt spontaneously._ DEAR HOLT,--The Introduction to filosofy is what I ment--I dont no the other book. I will try Nordau's Entartung this summer--as a rule however it duzn't profit me to read Jeremiads against evil--the example of a little good has more effect. A propo of kitchen ranges, I wish you wood remoov your recommendation from that Boynton Furnace Company's affair. We have struggld with it for five years--lost 2 cooks in consequens--burnt countless tons of extra coal, never had anything decently baikt, and now, having got rid of it for 15 dollars, are having a happy kitchen for the 1st time in our experience--all through your unprinsipld recommendation! You ought to hear my wife sware when she hears your name! I will try about a translator for Nordau--though the only man I can think of needs munny more than fame, and coodn't do the job for pure love of the publisher or author, or on an unsertainty. Yours affectionately, WILLIAM JAMES. _To Henry James_. PRINCETON, _Dec. 29, 1894_. DEAR H.,--I have been here for three days at my co-psychologist Baldwin's house, presiding over a meeting of the American Association of Psychologists, which has proved a very solid and successful affair.[3] Strange to say, we are getting to be veterans, and the brunt of the discussions was borne by former students of mine. It is a very healthy movement. Alice is with me, the weather is frosty clear and cold, touching zero this A.M. and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a beautiful place.... _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _Apr. 26, 1895_. ...I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense gusto. It almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about the subject. The English genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the technicalities away. B. is a great man.... _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ SPRINGFIELD CENTRE, N.Y., _June 16, 1895_. MY DEAR FRIEND,--About the 22nd! I will come if you command it; but reflect on my situation ere you do so. Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification--things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest--oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me to give up? Alas! I aspire downwards, and really _am_ nothing, _not becoming_ a savage as I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be content with being! But I wish that _you_ also aspired to the wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region where one can really "recline on one's divine composure," and, as long as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one's birth-right of freedom and relief from every fever and falsity. Stretched out on such a shelf,--with thee beside me singing in the wilderness,--what babblings might go on, what judgment-day discourse! Command me to give it up and return, if you will, by telegram addressed "Adirondack Lodge, North Elba, N.Y." In any case I shall return before the end of the month, and later shall be hanging about Cambridge some time in July, giving lectures (for my sins) in the Summer School. I am staying now with a cousin on Otsego Lake, a dear old country-place that has been in their family for a century, and is rich and ample and reposeful. The Kipling visit went off splendidly--he's a regular little brick of a man; but it's strange that with so much sympathy with the insides of every living thing, brute or human, drunk or sober, he should have so little sympathy with those of a Yankee--who also is, in the last analysis, one of God's creatures. I have stopped at Williamstown, at Albany, at Amsterdam, at Utica, at Syracuse, and finally here, each time to visit human beings with whom I had business of some sort or other. The best was Benj. Paul Blood at Amsterdam, a son of the soil, but a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue, of whom I will tell you more some day. I will by the way enclose some clippings from his latest "effort." "Yes, Paul is quite a _correspondent_!" as a citizen remarked to me from whom I inquired the way to his dwelling. Don't you think "correspondent" rather a good generic term for "man of letters," from the point of view of the country-town newspaper reader?... Now, dear, noble, incredibly perfect Madam, you won't take ill my reluctance about going to Beverly, even to your abode, so soon. I am a badly mixed critter, and I experience a certain organic need for simplification and solitude that is quite imperious, and so vital as actually to be respectable even by others. So be indulgent to your ever faithful and worshipful, W. J. _To G. H. Howison._ Cambridge, _July 17, 1895_. MY DEAR HOWISON,--How you _have_ misunderstood the application of my word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic idealism! Quite the reverse--if there be a philosophy that I believe in, it's that. The word came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to _be_ than to define your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literature _will_ often seem to me the hollowest thing. My word trivial was a general reflection exhaling from this mood, vile indeed in a supposed professor. Where it will end with me, I do not know. I wish I could give it all up. But perhaps it is a grand climacteric and will pass away. At present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year, if I can do it at all. And I envy you your stalwart and steadfast enthusiasm and faith. Always devotedly yours, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ GLENWOOD SPRINGS, COLORADO, _Aug. 13, 1895_. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair _demoiselles_! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you. But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very quietly and happily. We have had a rather large _train de maison_ hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials--a very pleasant change. I, you see, am farther away from home than I have ever been before on this side of the Atlantic, namely, in the state of Colorado, and just now in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I have been giving a course of six lectures on psychology "for teachers" at a so-called "summer-school" in Colorado Springs. I had to remain for three nights and three days in the train to get there, and it has made me understand the vastness of my dear native land better than I ever did before.... The trouble with all this new civilization is that it is based, not on saving, but on borrowing; and when hard times come, as they did come three years ago, everyone goes bankrupt. But the vision of the future, the dreams of the possible, keep everyone enthusiastic, and so the work goes on. Such conditions have never existed before on so enormous a scale. But I must not write you a treatise on national economy!--I got through the year very well in regard to health, and gave in the course of it, what I had never done before, a number of lectures to teachers in Boston and New York. I also repeated my course in Cosmology in the new woman's College which has lately been established in connection with our University. The consequence is that I laid by more than a thousand dollars, an absolutely new and proportionately pleasant experience for me. To make up for it, I haven't had an idea or written anything to speak of except the "presidential address" which I sent you, and which really contained nothing new.... And now is not that enough gossip about ourselves? I wish I could, by telephone, at this moment, hear just where and how you all are, and what you are all doing. In the mountains somewhere, of course, and I trust all well; but it is perhaps fifteen or twenty years too soon for transatlantic telephone. My surroundings here, so much like those of Switzerland, bring you before me in a lively manner. I enclose a picture of one of the streets at Colorado Springs for Madame Flournoy, and another one of a "cowboy" for that one of the _demoiselles_ who is most _romanesque_. Alice, Blanche--but I have actually gone and been and forgotten the name of the magnificent third one, whose resplendent face I so well remember notwithstanding. _Dulcissima mundi nomina_, all of them; and I do hope that they are being educated in a thoroughly emancipated way, just like true American girls, with no laws except those imposed by their own sense of fitness. I am sure it produces the best results! How did the teaching go last year? I mean your own teaching. Have you started any new lines? And how is Chantre? and how Ritter? And how Monsieur Gowd? Please give my best regards to all round, especially to Ritter. Have you a copy left of your "Métaphysique et Psychologie"? In some inscrutable way my copy has disappeared, and the book is reported _épuisé_. With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours, W. JAMES. _To his Daughter._ EL PASO, COLO., _Aug. 8, 1895_. SWEETEST OF LIVING Pegs,--Your letter made glad my heart the day before yesterday, and I marveled to see what an improvement had come over your handwriting in the short space of six weeks. "Orphly" and "ofly" are good ways to spell "awfully," too. I went up a high mountain yesterday and saw all the kingdoms of the world spread out before me, on the illimitable prairie which looked like a map. The sky glowed and made the earth look like a stained-glass window. The mountains are bright red. All the flowers and plants are different from those at home. There is an immense mastiff in my house here. I think that even you would like him, he is so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf. His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are magnificent, his tail keeps wagging _all_ the time, and he makes on me the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good. I must now go and hear two other men lecture. Many kisses, also to Tweedy, from your ever loving, DAD. * * * * * On December 17, 1895, President Cleveland's Venezuela message startled the world and created a situation with which the next three letters are concerned. The boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana had been dragging along for years. The public had no reason to suppose that it was becoming acute, or that the United States was particularly interested in it, and had, in fact, not been giving the matter so much as a thought. All at once the President sent a message to Congress in which he announced that it was incumbent upon the United States to "take measures to determine ... the true" boundary line, and then to "resist by every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests" any appropriation by Great Britain of territory not thus determined to be hers. In addition he sent to Congress, and thus published, the diplomatic despatches which had already passed between Mr. Olney and Lord Salisbury. In these Mr. Olney had informed the representative of the Empire which was sovereign in British Guiana "that distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpedient," and that "today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." Lord Salisbury had squarely declined to concede that the United States could, of its own initiative, assume to settle the boundary dispute. It was difficult to see how either Great Britain or the United States could with dignity alter the position which its minister had assumed. James was a warm admirer of the President, but this seemingly wanton provocation of a friendly nation horrified him. He considered that no blunder in statesmanship could be more dangerous than a premature appeal to a people's fighting pride, and that no perils inherent in the Venezuela boundary dispute were as grave as was the danger that popular explosions on one or both sides of the Atlantic would make it impossible for the two governments to proceed moderately. He was appalled at the outburst of Anglophobia and war-talk which followed the message. The war-cloud hung in the heavens for several weeks. Then, suddenly, a breeze from a strange quarter relieved the atmosphere. The Jameson raid occurred in Africa, and the Kaiser sent his famous message to President Kruger.[4] The English press turned its fire upon the Kaiser. The world's attention was diverted from Venezuela, and the boundary dispute was quietly and amicably disposed of. _To E. L. Godkin._ Cambridge, _Christmas Eve [1895]_. DARLING OLD GODKIN,--The only Christmas present I can send you is a word of thanks and a _bravo bravissimo_ for your glorious fight against the powers of darkness. I swear it brings back the days of '61 again, when the worst enemies of our country were in our own borders. But now that defervescence has set in, and the long, long campaign of discussion and education is about to begin, you will have to bear the leading part in it, and I beseech you to be as non-expletive and patiently explanatory as you can, for thus will you be the more effective. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do! The insincere propaganda of jingoism as a mere weapon of attack on the President was diabolic. But in the rally of the country to the President's message lay that instinct of obedience to leaders which is the prime condition of all effective greatness in a nation. And after all, when one thinks that the only England most Americans are taught to conceive of is the bugaboo coward-England, ready to invade the Globe wherever there is no danger, the rally does not necessarily show savagery, but only ignorance. We are all ready to be savage in _some_ cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. Two things are, however, _désormais_ certain: Three days of fighting mob-hysteria at Washington 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 opportunity. Since this country has absolutely nothing to fear, or 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. We live and learn: the labor of civilizing ourselves is for the next thirty years going to be complicated with this other abominable new issue of which the seed was sown last week. _You_ saw the new kind of danger, as you always do, before anyone else; but it grew gigantic much more suddenly than even you conceived to be possible. Olney's Jefferson Brick style makes of our Foreign Office a laughing-stock, of course. But why, oh why, couldn't he and Cleveland and Congress between them have left out the infernal war-threat and simply asked for $100,000 for a judicial commission to enable us to see exactly to what effect we ought, in justice, to exert our influence. That commission, if its decision were adverse, would have put England "in a hole," awakened allies for us in all countries, been a solemn step forward in the line of national righteousness, covered us with dignity, and all the rest. But no--_omnia ademit una dies infesta tibi tot præmia vitæ!_--Still, the campaign of education may raise us out of it all yet. Distrust of each other must not be suffered to go too far, for that way lies destruction. Dear old Godkin--I don't know whether you will have read more than the first page--I didn't expect to write more than one and a half, but the steam will work off. I haven't slept right for a week. I have just given my Harry, now a freshman, your "Comments and Reflections," and have been renewing my youth in some of its admirable pages. But why the dickens did you leave out some of the most delectable of the old sentences in the cottager and boarder essay?[5] Don't curse God and die, dear old fellow. Live and be patient and fight for us a long time yet in this new war. Best regards to Mrs. Godkin and to Lawrence, and a merry Christmas. Yours ever affectionately, Wm. James. _To F. W. H. Myers._ Cambridge, _Jan. 1, 1896_. MY DEAR MYERS,--Here is a happy New Year to you with my presidential address for a gift.[6] _Valeat quantum._ The end could have been expanded, but probably this is enough to set the S. P. R. against a lofty _Kultur-historisch_ background; and where we have to do so much champing of the jaws on minute details of cases, that seems to me a good point in a president's address. In the first half, it has just come over me that what I say of one line of fact being "strengthened in the flank" by another is an "uprush" from my subliminal memory of words of Gurney's--but that does no harm.... Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other's gore. You will be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge's skull. It will be a war of extermination when it comes, for neither side can tell when it is beaten, and the last man will bury the penultimate one, and then die himself. The French will then occupy England and the Spaniards America. Both will unite against the Germans, and no one can foretell the end. But seriously, all true patriots here have had a hell of a time. It has been a most instructive thing for the dispassionate student of history to see how near the surface in all of us the old fighting instinct lies, and how slight an appeal will wake it up. Once _really_ waked, there is no retreat. So the whole wisdom of governors should be to avoid the direct appeals. This your European governments know; but we in our bottomless innocence and ignorance over here know nothing, and Cleveland in my opinion, by his explicit allusion to war, has committed the biggest political crime I have ever seen here. The secession of the southern states had more excuse. There was absolutely no need of it. A commission solemnly appointed to pronounce justice in the Venezuela case would, if its decision were adverse to your country, have doubtless aroused the Liberal party in England to espouse the policy of arbitrating, and would have covered us with dignity, if no threat of war had been uttered. But as it is, who can see the way out? Every one goes about now saying war is not to be. But with these volcanic forces who can tell? I suppose that the offices of Germany or Italy might in any case, however, save us from what would be the worst disaster to civilization that our time could bring forth. The astounding thing is the latent Anglophobia now revealed. It is most of it directly traceable to the diabolic machinations of the party of protection for the past twenty years. They have lived by every sort of infamous sophistication, and hatred of England has been one of their most conspicuous notes.... I hope _you'll_ read my address--unless indeed Gladstone will consent!! Ever thine--I hate to think of "embruing" my hands in (or with?) your blood. W. J. [S. P. R.] _Proceedings XXIX_ just in--hurrah for your 200-odd pages! I have been ultra non-committal as to our evidence,--thinking it to be good presidential policy,--but I may have overdone the impartiality business. _To F. W. H. Myers._ Cambridge, _Feb. 5, 1896_. DEAR MYERS,--_Voici_ the proof! Pray _send me a revise_--Cattell wants to print it simultaneously _in extenso_ in "Science," which I judge to be a very good piece of luck for it. When will the next "Proceedings" be likely to appear? I hope your rich tones were those that rolled off its periods, and that you didn't flinch, but rather raised your voice, when your own genius was mentioned. I read it both in New York and Boston to full houses, but heard no comments on the spot.... As for Venezuela, Ach! of that be silent! as Carlyle would have said. It is a sickening business, but some good may come out of it yet. Don't feel too badly about the Anglophobia here. It doesn't mean so much. Remember by what words the country was roused: "Supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor."[7] If any other country's ruler had expressed himself with equal moral ponderosity wouldn't the population have gone twice as fighting-mad as ours? Of course it would; the wolf would have been aroused; and when the wolf once gets going, we know that there is no crime of which it doesn't sincerely begin to believe its oppressor, the lamb down-stream, to be guilty. The great proof that civilization _does_ move, however, is the magnificent conduct of the British press. Yours everlastingly, W. J. _To Henry Holt, Esq._ Cambridge, _Jan. 19, 1896_. MY DEAR HOLT,--At the risk of displeasing you, I think I won't have my photograph taken, even at no cost to myself. I abhor this hawking about of everybody's phiz which is growing on every hand, and don't see why having written a book should expose one to it. I am sorry that you should have succumbed to the supposed trade necessity. In any case, I will stand on my rights as a free man. You may kill me, but you shan't publish my photograph. Put a blank "thumbnail" in its place. Very very sorry to displease a man whom I love so much. Always lovingly yours, Wm. James. _To his Class at Radcliffe College which had sent a potted azalea to him at Easter._ Cambridge, _Apr. 6, 1896_. DEAR YOUNG LADIES,--I am deeply touched by your remembrance. It is the first time anyone ever treated me so kindly, so you may well believe that the impression on the heart of the lonely sufferer will be even more durable than the impression on your minds of all the teachings of Philosophy 2A. I now perceive one immense omission in my Psychology,--the deepest principle of Human Nature is the _craving to be appreciated_, and I left it out altogether from the book, because I had never had it gratified till now. I fear you have let loose a demon in me, and that all my actions will now be for the sake of such rewards. However, I will try to be faithful to this one unique and beautiful azalea tree, the pride of my life and delight of my existence. Winter and summer will I tend and water it--even with my tears. Mrs. James shall never go near it or touch it. If it dies, I will die too; and if I die, it shall be planted on my grave. Don't take all this too jocosely, but believe in the extreme pleasure you have caused me, and in the affectionate feelings with which I am and shall always be faithfully your friend, Wm. James. _To Henry James._ [Cambridge] _Apr. 17, 1896_. DEAR H.,--Too busy to live almost, lectures and laboratory, dentists and dinner-parties, so that I am much played out, but get off today for eight days' vacation _via_ New Haven, where I deliver an "address" tonight, to the Yale Philosophy Club. I shall make it the title of a small volume of collected things called "The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy," and then I think write no more addresses, of which the form takes it out of one unduly. If I do anything more, it will be a book on general Philosophy. I have been having a bad conscience about not writing to you, when your letter of the 7th came yesterday expressing a bad conscience of your own. You certainly do your duty best. I am glad to think of you in the country and hope it will succeed with you and make you thrive. I look forward with much excitement to the fruit of all this work.... Just a word of good-will and good wish. I think I shall go to the Hot Springs of Virginia for next week. The spring has burst upon us, hot and droughtily, after a glorious burly winter-playing March. Yours ever, W. J. * * * * * The next letter begins by acknowledging one which had alluded to the death of a Cambridge gentleman who had been run over in the street, almost under William James's eyes. Henry James had closed his allusion by exclaiming, "What melancholy, what terrible duties _vous incombent_ when your neighbours are destroyed. And telling that poor man's wife!--Life _is_ heroic--however we 'fix' it! Even as I write these words the St. Louis horror bursts in upon me in the evening paper. Inconceivable--I can't try; and I _won't_. Strange how practically all one's sense of news from the U. S. here is huge Horrors and Catastrophes. It's a terrible country _not_ to live in." He would have exclaimed even more if he had witnessed the mescal experiment, that is briefly mentioned in the letter that follows. He might then have gone on to remark that the "fixing" of life seemed, in William's neighborhood, to be quite gratuitously heroic. William James and his wife and the youngest child were alone in the Chocorua cottage for a few days, picnicking by themselves without any servant. They had no horse; at that season of the year hours often went by without any one passing the house; there was no telephone, no neighbor within a mile, no good doctor within eighteen miles. It was quite characteristic of James that he should think such conditions ideal for testing an unknown drug on himself. There would be no interruptions. He had no fear. He was impatient to satisfy his curiosity about the promised hallucinations of color. But the effects of one dose were, for a while, much more alarming than his letter would give one to understand. _To Henry James._ CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1896_. Your long letter of Whitsuntide week in London came yesterday evening, and was read by me aloud to Alice and Harry as we sat at tea in the window to get the last rays of the Sunday's [sun]. You have too much feeling of duty about corresponding with us, and, I imagine, with everyone. I think you have behaved most handsomely of late--and always, and though your letters are the great _fête_ of our lives, I won't be "on your mind" for worlds. Your general feeling of unfulfilled obligations is one that runs in the family--I at least am often afflicted by it--but it is "morbid." The horrors of _not_ living in America, as you so well put it, are not shared by those who do live here. All that the telegraph imparts are the shocks; the "happy homes," good husbands and fathers, fine weather, honest business men, neat new houses, punctual meetings of engagements, etc., of which the country mainly consists, are never cabled over. Of course, the Saint Louis disaster is dreadful, but it will very likely end by "improving" the city. The really bad thing here is the silly wave that has gone over the public mind--protection humbug, silver, jingoism, etc. It is a case of "mob-psychology." Any country is liable to it if circumstances conspire, and our circumstances have conspired. It is very hard to get them out of the rut. It _may_ take another financial crash to get them out--which, of course, will be an expensive method. It is no more foolish and considerably less damnable than the Russophobia of England, which would seem to have been responsible for the Armenian massacres. That to me is the biggest indictment "of our boasted civilization"!! It _requires_ England, I say nothing of the other powers, to maintain the Turks at that business. We have let our little place, our tenant arrives the day after tomorrow, and Alice and I and Tweedie have been here a week enjoying it and cleaning house and place. She has worked like a beaver. I had two days spoiled by a psychological experiment with _mescal_, an intoxicant used by some of our Southwestern Indians in their religious ceremonies, a sort of cactus bud, of which the U. S. Government had distributed a supply to certain medical men, including Weir Mitchell, who sent me some to try. He had himself been "in fairyland." It gives the most glorious visions of color--every object thought of appears in a jeweled splendor unknown to the natural world. It disturbs the stomach somewhat, but that, according to W. M., was a cheap price, etc. I took one bud three days ago, was violently sick for 24 hours, and had no other symptom whatever except that and the _Katzenjammer_ the following day. I will take the visions on trust! We have had three days of delicious rain--it all soaks into the sandy soil here and leaves no mud whatever. The little place is the most curious mixture of sadness with delight. The sadness of _things_--things every one of which was done either by our hands or by our planning, old furniture renovated, there isn't an object in the house that isn't associated with past life, old summers, dead people, people who will never come again, etc., and the way it catches you round the heart when you first come and open the house from its long winter sleep is most extraordinary. I have been reading Bourget's "Idylle Tragique," which he very kindly sent me, and since then have been reading in Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which I never read before, strange to say. I must say that T. rather kills B., for my mind. B.'s moral atmosphere is anyhow so foreign to me, a lewdness so obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a moral _donnée_ at all; and then his overlabored descriptions, and excessive explanations. But with it all an earnestness and enthusiasm for getting it said as well as possible, a richness of epithet, and a warmth of heart that makes you like him, in spite of the unmanliness of all the things he writes about. I suppose there is a stratum in France to whom it is all manly and ideal, but he and I are, as Rosina says, a bad combination.... Tolstoy is immense! I am glad _you_ are in a writing vein again, to go still higher up the scale! I have abstained on principle from the "Atlantic" serial, wishing to get it all at once. I am not going abroad; I can't afford it. I have a chance to give $1500 worth of summer lectures here, which won't recur. I have a heavy year of work next year, and shall very likely _need_ to go the following summer, which will anyhow be after a more becoming interval than this, so, _somme toute_, it is postponed. If I went I should certainly enjoy seeing you at Rye more than in London, which I confess tempts me little now. I love to _see_ it, but staying there doesn't seem to agree with me, and only suggests constraint and money-spending, apart from seeing you. I wish you could see how comfortable our Cambridge house has got at last to be. Alice who is upstairs sewing whilst I write below by the lamp--a great wood fire hissing in the fireplace--sings out her thanks and love to you.... _To Benjamin Paul Blood._ CHATHAM, MASS., _June 28, 1896_. MY DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter was an "event," as anything always is from your pen--though of course I never expected any acknowledgment of my booklet. Fear of life in one form or other is the great thing to exorcise; but it isn't reason that will ever do it. Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. Barely more than a year ago I was sitting at your table and dallying with the thought of publishing an anthology of your works. But, like many other projects, it has been postponed in indefinition. The hour never came last year, and pretty surely will not come next. Nevertheless I shall work for your fame some time! Count on W. J.[8] I wound up my "seminary" in speculative psychology a month ago by reading some passages from the "Flaw in Supremacy"--"game flavored as a hawk's wing." "Ever not quite" covers a deal of truth--yet it seems a very simple thing to have said. "There is no _Absolute_" were my last words. Whereupon a number of students asked where they could get "that pamphlet" and I distributed nearly all the copies I had from you. I wish you would keep on writing, but I see you are a man of discontinuity and insights, and not a philosophic pack-horse, or pack-mule.... I rejoice that ten hours a day of toil makes you feel so hearty. Verily Mr. Rindge says truly. He is a Cambridge boy, who made a fortune in California, and then gave a lot of public buildings to his native town. Unfortunately he insisted on bedecking them with "mottoes" of his own composition, and over the Manual Training School near my house one reads: "_Work is one of our greatest blessings. Every man should have an honest occupation_"--which, if not lapidary in style, is at least what my father once said. Swedenborg's writings were, viz., "insipid with veracity," as your case now again demonstrates. Have you read Tolstoy's "War and Peace"? I am just about finishing it. It is undoubtedly the greatest novel ever written--also insipid with veracity. The man is infallible--and the anesthetic revelation[9] plays a part as in no writer. You have very likely read it. If you haven't, sell all you have and buy the book, for I know it will speak to your very gizzard. Pray thank Mrs. Blood for her appreciation of my "booklet" (such things encourage a writer!), and believe me ever sincerely yours, Wm. James. In July, 1896, James delivered, in Buffalo and at the Chautauqua Assembly, the substance of the lectures that were later published as "Talks to Teachers." His impressions of Chautauqua were so characteristic and so lively that they must be included here, even though they duplicate in some measure a well-known passage in the essay called "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings." _To Mrs. James._ CHAUTAUQUA, _July 23, 1896_. ...The audience is some 500, in an open-air auditorium where (strange to say) everyone seems to hear well; and it is very good-looking--mostly teachers and women, but they make the best impression of any audience of that sort that I have seen except the Brooklyn one. So here I go again!... _July 24_, 9.30 P.M. ...X---- departed after breakfast--a good inarticulate man, farmer's boy, four years soldier from private to major, business man in various States, great reader, editor of a "Handbook of Facts," full of swelling and bursting _Weltschmerz_ and religious melancholy, yet no more flexibility or self-power in his mind than in a boot-jack. Altogether, what with the teachers, him and others whom I've met, I'm put in conceit of college training. It certainly gives glibness and flexibility, if it doesn't give earnestness and depth. I've been meeting minds so earnest and helpless that it takes them half an hour to get from one idea to its immediately adjacent next neighbor, and that with infinite creaking and groaning. And when they've got to the next idea, they lie down on it with their whole weight and can get no farther, like a cow on a door-mat, so that you can get neither in nor out with them. Still, glibness is not all. Weight is something, even cow-weight. Tolstoy feels these things so--I am still in "Anna Karenina," volume I, a book almost incredible and supernatural for veracity. I wish we were reading it aloud together. It has rained at intervals all day. Young Vincent, a powerful fellow, took me over and into the whole vast college side of the institution this A.M. I have heard 4-1/2 lectures, including the one I gave myself at 4 o'clock, to about 1200 or more in the vast open amphitheatre, which seats 6000 and which has very good acoustic properties. I think my voice sufficed. I can't judge of the effect. Of course I left out all that gossip about my medical degree, etc. But I don't want any more sporadic lecturing--I must stick to more inward things. _July 26_, 12:30 P.M. ...'T is the sabbath and I am just in from the amphitheatre, where the Rev.---- has been chanting, calling and bellowing his hour-and-a-quarter-long sermon to 6000 people at least--a sad audition. The music was bully, a chorus of some 700, splendidly drilled, with the audience to help. I have myself been asked to lead, or, if not to lead, at least to do something prominent--I declined so quick that I didn't fully gather what it was--in the exercise which I have marked on the program I enclose. Young Vincent, whom I take to be a splendid young fellow, told me it was the characteristically "Chautauquan" event of the day. I would give anything to have you here. I didn't write yesterday because there is no mail till tomorrow. I went to four lectures, in whole or in part. All to hundreds of human beings, a large proportion unable to get seats, who transport themselves from one lecture-room to another _en masse_. One was on bread-making, with practical demonstrations. One was on _walking_, by a graceful young Delsartian, who showed us a lot. One was on telling stories to children, the psychology and pedagogy of it. The audiences interrupt and ask questions occasionally in spite of their size. There is hardly a pretty woman's face in the lot, and they seem to have little or no humor in their composition. No _epicureanism_ of any sort! Yesterday was a beautiful day, and I sailed an hour and a half down the Lake again to "Celoron," "America's greatest pleasure resort,"--in other words popcorn and peep-show place. A sort of Midway-Pleasance in the wilderness--supported Heaven knows how, so far from any human habitation except the odd little Jamestown from which a tramway leads to it. Good monkeys, bears, foxes, etc. Endless peanuts, popcorn, bananas, and soft drinks; crowds of people, a ferris wheel, a balloon ascension, with a man dropping by a parachute, a theatre, a vast concert hall, and all sorts of peep-shows. I feel as if I were in a foreign land; even as far east as this the accent of everyone is terrific. The "Nation" is no more known than the London "Times." I see no need of going to Europe when such wonders are close by. I breakfasted with a Methodist parson with 32 false teeth, at the X's table, and discoursed of demoniacal possession. The wife said she had my portrait in her bedroom with the words written under it, "I want to bring a balm to human lives"!!!!! Supposed to be a quotation from me!!! After breakfast an extremely interesting lady who has suffered from half-possessional insanity gave me a long account of her case. Life _is_ heroic indeed, as Harry wrote. I shall stay through tomorrow, and get to Syracuse on Tuesday.... _July 27._ ...It rained hard last night, and today a part of the time. I took a lesson in roasting, in Delsarte, and I made with my own fair hands a beautiful loaf of graham bread with some rolls, long, flute-like, and delicious. I should have sent them to you by express, only it seemed unnecessary, since I can keep the family in bread easily after my return home. Please tell this, with amplifications, to Peggy and Tweedy.... BUFFALO, N.Y., _July 29_. ...The Chautauqua week, or rather six and a half days, has been a real success. I have learned a lot, but I'm glad to get into something less blameless but more admiration-worthy. The flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye, anything to break the unlovely level of 10,000 good people--a crime, murder, rape, elopement, anything would do. I don't see how the younger Vincents stand it, because they are people of such spirit.... SYRACUSE, N.Y., _July 31_. ...Now for Utica and Lake Placid by rail, with East Hill in prospect for tomorrow. You bet I rejoice at the outlook--I long to escape from tepidity. Even an Armenian massacre, whether to be killer or killed, would seem an agreeable change from the blamelessness of Chautauqua as she lies soaking year after year in her lakeside sun and showers. Man wants to be _stretched_ to his utmost, if not in one way then in another!... _To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._ BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 2, 1896_. ...I have seen more women and less beauty, heard more voices and less sweetness, perceived more earnestness and less triumph than I ever supposed possible. Most of the American nation (and probably all nations) is white-trash,--but Tolstoy has borne me up--and I say unto _you_: "_Smooth out your voices_ if you want to be saved"!!... _To Charles Renouvier._ BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 4, 1896_. DEAR MR. RENOUVIER,--My wife announces to me from Cambridge the reception of two immense volumes from you on the Philosophy of History. I thank you most heartily for the gift, and am more and more amazed at your intellectual and moral power--physical power, too, for the nervous energy required for your work has to be extremely great. My own nervous energy is a small teacup-full, and is more than consumed by my duties of teaching, so that almost none is left over for writing. I sent you a "New World" the other day, however, with an article in it called "The Will to Believe," in which (if you took the trouble to glance at it) you probably recognized how completely I am still your disciple. In this point perhaps more fully than in any other; and this point is central! I have to lecture on general "psychology" and "morbid psychology," "the philosophy of nature" and the "philosophy of Kant," thirteen lectures a week for half the year and eight for the rest. Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort,[10] so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all--reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month. During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children. All this proves that I shall be slow in attaining to the reading of your book. I have not yet read Pillon's last _Année_ except some of the book notices and Danriac's article. How admirably clear P. is in style, and what a power of reading he possesses. I hope, dear Mr. Renouvier, that the years are not weighing heavily upon you, and that this letter will find you well in body and in mind. Yours gratefully and faithfully, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--You see the electric current of sympathy that binds the world together--I turn towards you, and the place I write from repeats the name of your Lake Leman. I was informed yesterday, however, that the lake here was named after Lake Geneva _in the State of New York_! and _that_ Lake only has Leman for its Godmother. Still you see how dependent, whether immediately or remotely, America is on Europe. I was at Niagara some three weeks ago, and bought a photograph as souvenir and addressed it to you after getting back to Cambridge. Possibly Madame Flournoy will deign to accept it. I have thought of you a great deal without writing, for truly, my dear Flournoy, there is hardly a human being with whom I feel as much sympathy of aims and character, or feel as much "at home," as I do with you. It is as if we were of the same stock, and I often mentally turn and make a remark to you, which the pressure of life's occupations prevents from ever finding its way to paper. I am hoping that you may have figured, or at any rate _been_, at the Munich "Congress"--that apparently stupendous affair. If they keep growing at this rate, the next Paris one will be altogether too heavy. I have heard no details of the meeting as yet. But whether you have been at Munich or not, I trust that you have been having a salubrious and happy vacation so far, and that Mrs. Flournoy and the young people are all well. I will venture to suppose that your illness of last year has left no bad effects whatever behind. I myself have had a rather busy and instructive, though possibly not very hygienic summer, making money (in moderate amounts) by lecturing on psychology to teachers at different "summer schools" in this land. There is a great fermentation in "pædagogy" at present in the U.S., and my wares come in for their share of patronage. But although I learn a good deal and become a better American for having all the travel and social experience, it has ended by being too tiresome; and when I give the lectures at Chicago, which I begin tomorrow, I shall have them stenographed and very likely published in a very small volume, and so remove from myself the temptation ever to give them again. Last year was a year of hard work, and before the end of the term came, I was in a state of bad neurasthenic fatigue, but I got through outwardly all right. I have definitely given up the laboratory, for which I am more and more unfit, and shall probably devote what little ability I may hereafter have to purely "speculative" work. My inability to read troubles me a good deal: I am in arrears of several years with psychological literature, which, to tell the truth, does grow now at a pace too rapid for anyone to follow. I was engaged to review Stout's new book (which I fancy is very good) for "Mind," and after keeping it two months had to back out, from sheer inability to read it, and to ask permission to hand it over to my colleague Royce. Have you seen the colossal Renouvier's two vast volumes on the philosophy of history?--that will be another thing worth reading no doubt, yet very difficult to read. I give a course in Kant for the first time in my life (!) next year, and at present and for many months to come shall have to put most of my reading to the service of that overgrown subject.... Of course you have read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." I never had that exquisite felicity before this summer, and now I feel as if I knew _perfection_ in the representation of human life. Life indeed seems less real than his tale of it. Such infallible veracity! The impression haunts me as nothing literary ever haunted me before. I imagine you lounging on some steep mountainside, with those demoiselles all grown too tall and beautiful and proud to think otherwise than with disdain of their elderly _commensal_ who spoke such difficult French when he took walks with them at Vers-chez-les-Blanc. But I hope that they are happy as they were then. Cannot we all pass some summer near each other again, and can't it next time be in Tyrol rather than in Switzerland, for the purpose of increasing in all of us that "knowledge of the world" which is so desirable? I think it would be a splendid plan. At any rate, wherever you are, take my most affectionate regards for yourself and Madame Flournoy and all of yours, and believe me ever sincerely your friend, Wm. James. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_. DEAR MILLER,--Your letter from Halle of June 22nd came duly, but treating of things eternal as it did, I thought it called for no reply till I should have caught up with more temporal matters, of which there has been no lack to press on my attention. To tell the truth, regarding you as my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy, I was greatly relieved to find that you had nothing worse to say about "The Will to Believe." You say you are no "rationalist," and yet you speak of the "sharp" distinction between beliefs based on "inner evidence" and beliefs based on "craving." I can find _nothing_ sharp (or susceptible of schoolmaster's codification) in the different degrees of "liveliness" in hypotheses concerning the universe, or distinguish _a priori_ between legitimate and illegitimate cravings. And when an hypothesis _is_ once a live one, one _risks_ something in one's practical relations towards truth and error, _whichever_ of the three positions (affirmation, doubt, or negation) one may take up towards it. _The individual himself is the only rightful chooser of his risk._ Hence respectful toleration, as the only law that logic can lay down. You don't say a word against my _logic_, which seems to me to cover your cases entirely in its compartments. I class you as one to whom the religious hypothesis is _von vornherein_ so dead, that the risk of error in espousing it now far outweighs for you the chance of truth, so you simply stake your money on the field as against it. If you _say_ this, of course I can, as logician, have no quarrel with you, even though my own choice of risk (determined by the irrational impressions, suspicions, cravings, senses of direction in nature, or what not, that make religion for me a more live hypothesis than for you) leads me to an opposite methodical decision. Of course if any one comes along and says that men at large don't need to have facility of faith in their inner convictions preached to them, [that] they have only too much readiness in that way already, and the one thing needful to preach is that they should hesitate with their convictions, and take their faiths out for an airing into the howling wilderness of nature, I should also agree. But my paper wasn't addressed to mankind at large but to a limited set of studious persons, badly under the ban just now of certain authorities whose simple-minded faith in "naturalism" also is sorely in need of an airing--and an airing, as it seems to me, of the sort I tried to give. But all this is unimportant; and I still await criticism of my _Auseinandersetzung_ of the _logical situation_ of man's mind _gegenüber_ the Universe, in respect to the risks it runs. I wish I could have been with you at Munich and heard the deep-lunged Germans roar at each other. I care not for the matters uttered, if I only could hear the voice. I hope you met [Henry] Sidgwick there. I sent him the American Hallucination-Census results, after considerable toil over them, but S. never acknowledges or answers anything, so I'll have to wait to hear from someone else whether he "got them off." I have had a somewhat unwholesome summer. Much lecturing to teachers and sitting up to talk with strangers. But it is instructive and makes one patriotic, and in six days I shall have finished the Chicago lectures, which begin tomorrow, and get straight to Keene Valley for the rest of September. My conditions just now are materially splendid, as I am the guest of a charming elderly lady, Mrs. Wilmarth, here at her country house, and in town at the finest hotel of the place. The political campaign is a bully one. Everyone outdoing himself in sweet reasonableness and persuasive argument--hardly an undignified note anywhere. It shows the deepening and elevating influence of a big topic of debate. It is difficult to doubt of a people part of whose life such an experience is. But imagine the country being saved by a McKinley! If only Reed had been the candidate! There have been some really splendid speeches and documents.... Ever thine, W. J. _To Henry James._ BURLINGTON, VT., _Sept. 28, 1896_. DEAR HENRY,--The summer is over! alas! alas! I left Keene Valley this A.M. where I have had three life-and-health-giving weeks in the forest and the mountain air, crossed Lake Champlain in the steamer, not a cloud in the sky, and sleep here tonight, meaning to take the train for Boston in the A.M. and read Kant's Life all day, so as to be able to lecture on it when I first meet my class. School begins on Thursday--this being Monday night. It has been a rather cultivating summer for me, and an active one, of which the best impression (after that of the Adirondack woods, or even before it) was that of the greatness of Chicago. It needs a Victor Hugo to celebrate it. But as you won't appreciate it without demonstration, and I can't give the demonstration (at least not now and on paper), I will say no more on that score! Alice came up for a week, but went down and through last night. She brought me up your letter of I don't remember now what date (after your return to London, about Wendell Holmes, Baldwin and Royalty, etc.) which was very delightful and for which I thank. But don't take your epistolary duties hard! Letter-writing becomes to me more and more of an affliction, I get so many business letters now. At Chicago, I tried a stenographer and type-writer with an alleviation that seemed almost miraculous. I think that I shall have to go in for one some hours a week in Cambridge. It just goes "whiff" and six or eight long letters are _done_, so far as you're concerned. I hear great reports of your "old things," and await the book. My great literary impression this summer has been Tolstoy. On the whole his atmosphere absorbs me into it as no one's else has ever done, and even his religious and melancholy stuff, his insanity, is probably more significant than the sanity of men who haven't been through that phase at all. But I am forgetting to tell you (strange to say, since it has hung over me like a cloud ever since it happened) of dear old Professor Child's death. We shall never see his curly head and thickset figure more. He had aged greatly in the past three years, since being thrown out of a carriage, and went to the hospital in July to be treated surgically. He never recovered and died in three weeks, after much suffering, his family not being called down from the country till the last days. He had a moral delicacy and a richness of heart that I never saw and never expect to see equaled.[1] The children bear it well, but I fear it will be a bad blow for dear Mrs. Child. She and Alice, I am glad to say, are great friends.... Good-night. _Leb' wohl!_ W. J. XII 1893-1899 (CONTINUED) _The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks_ _To Theodore Flournoy._ [Dictated] Cambridge, _Dec. 7, 1896_. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your altogether precious and delightful letter reached me duly, and you see I am making a not altogether too dilatory reply. In the first place, we congratulate you upon the new-comer, and think if she only proves as satisfactory a damsel as her charming elder sisters, you will never have any occasion to regret that she is not a boy. I hope that Madame Flournoy is by this time thoroughly strong and well, and that everything is perfect with the baby. I should like to have been at Munich with you; I have heard a good many accounts of the jollity of the proceedings there, but on the whole I did a more wholesome thing to stay in my own country, of which the dangers and dark sides are singularly exaggerated in Europe. Your lamentations on your cerebral state make me smile, knowing, as I do, under all your subjective feelings, how great your vigor is. Of course I sympathize with you about the laboratory, and advise you, since it seems to me you are in a position to make conditions rather than have them imposed on you, simply to drop it and teach what you prefer. Whatever the latter may be, it will be as good for the students as if they had something else from you in its place, and I see no need in this world, when there is someone provided somewhere to do everything, for anyone of us to do what he does least willingly and well. _I_ have got rid of the laboratory forever, and should resign my place immediately if they reimposed its duties upon me. The results that come from all this laboratory work seem to me to grow more and more disappointing and trivial. What is most needed is new ideas. For every man who has one of them one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge patiently at some unimportant experiment. The atmosphere of your mind is in an extraordinary degree sane and balanced on philosophical matters. That is where your forte lies, and where your University ought to see that its best interests lie in having you employed. Don't consider this advice impertinent. Your temperament is such that I think you need to be strengthened from without in asserting your right to carry out your true vocation. Everything goes well with us here. The boys are developing finely; both of them taller than I am, and Peggy healthy and well. I have just been giving a course of public lectures of which I enclose you a ticket to amuse you.[11] The audience, a thousand in number, kept its numbers to the last. I was careful not to tread upon the domains of psychical research, although many of my hearers were eager that I should do so. _I am teaching Kant for the first time in my life_, and it gives me much satisfaction. I am also sending a collection of old essays through the press, of which I will send you a copy as soon as they appear; I am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid that what you never will appreciate is their wonderful English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison! Our political crisis is over, but the hard times still endure. Lack of confidence is a disease from which convalescence is not quick. I doubt, notwithstanding certain appearances, whether the country was ever morally in as sound a state as it now is, after all this discussion. And the very silver men, who have been treated as a party of dishonesty, are anything but that. They very likely are victims of the economic delusion, but their intentions are just as good as those of the other side.... If you meet my friend Ritter, please give him my love. I shall write to you again ere long _eigenhändig_. Meanwhile believe me, with lots of love to you all, especially to _ces demoiselles_, and felicitations to their mother, Always yours, Wm. James. My wife wishes to convey to Madame Flournoy her most loving regards and hopes for the little one. * * * * * James had already been invited to deliver a course of "Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh. He had not yet accepted for a definite date; but he had begun to collect illustrative material for the proposed lectures. A large number of references to such material were supplied to him by Mr. Henry W. Rankin of East Northfield. _To Henry W. Rankin._ NEWPORT, R.I., _Feb. 1, 1897_. DEAR MR. RANKIN,--A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much without asking anything in return. One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall of course duly advertise the Nevius book.[12] I am not as positive as you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and "suggestibility," that I feel as if no _general theory_ as yet would cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular "morbid-entity" whose commonest homologue today is the "spirit-control" observed in test-mediumship, and which tends to become the more benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded. This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not ignore the sporadic cases of old-fashioned malignant possession which still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the medical profession out of its idiotically _conceited ignorance_ of all such matters--matters which have everywhere and at all times played a vital part in human history. You have written me at different times about conversion, and about miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others. In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really _asks_. But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two _self-systems_ in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases _psychologically_, and leaves all the _religious importance_ to the result which it has on any other theory. As to true and false miracles, I don't know that I can follow you so well, for in any case the notion of a miracle as a mere attestation of superior power is one that I cannot espouse. A miracle must in any case be an expression of personal purpose, but the demon-purpose of antagonizing God and winning away his adherents has never yet taken hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, first _about the facts_, in all these matters; and I believe that the S. P. R. methods, if pertinaciously stuck to, will eventually do much to clear things up.--You see that, although religion is the great interest of my life, I am rather hopelessly non-evangelical, and take the whole thing too impersonally. But my College work is lightening in a way. Psychology is being handed over to others more and more, and I see a chance ahead for reading and study in other directions from those to which my very feeble powers in that line have hitherto been confined. I am going to give all the fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious biography and philosophy. Shield's book, Steenstra's, Gratry's, and Harris's, I don't yet know, but can easily get at them. I hope your health is better in this beautiful winter which we are having. I am very well, and so is all my family. Believe me, with affectionate regards, truly yours, Wm. James. _To Benjamin Paul Blood._ Cambridge, _Apr. 28, 1897_. DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet acknowledged the book,[13] 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.[14] _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,[15] 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"[16] 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."[17] _To James J. Putnam._ Cambridge, _Mar. [3?] 1898_. DEAR JIM,--Thanks for your noble-hearted letter, which makes me feel warm again. I am glad to learn that you feel positively _agin_ the proposed law, and hope that you will express yourself freely towards the professional brethren to that effect. Dr. Russell Sturgis has written me a similar letter. Once more, thanks! W. J. P.S. _March 3._ The "Transcript" report, I am sorry to say, was a good deal cut. I send you another copy, to keep and use where it will do most good. The rhetorical problem with me was to say things to the Committee that might neutralize the influence of their medical advisers, who, I supposed, had the inside track, and all the _prestige_. I being banded with the spiritists, faith-curers, magnetic healers, etc., etc. Strange affinities![18] W. J. _To François Pillon._ Cambridge, _June 15, 1898_. MY DEAR PILLON,--I have just received your pleasant letter and the _Année_, volume 8, and shall immediately proceed to read the latter, having finished reading my examinations yesterday, and being now free to enjoy the vacation, but excessively tired. I grieve to learn of poor Mrs. Pillon's continued ill health. How much patience both of you require. I think of you also as spending most of the summer in Paris, when the country contains so many more elements that are good for body and soul. How much has happened since I last heard from you! To say nothing of the Zola trial, we now have the Cuban War! A curious episode of history, showing how a nation's ideals can be changed in the twinkling of an eye, by a succession of outward events partly accidental. It is quite possible that, without the explosion of the Maine, we should still be at peace, though, since the _basis_ of the whole American attitude is the persuasion on the part of the people that the cruelty and misrule of Spain in Cuba call for her expulsion (so that in that sense our war is just what a war of "the powers" against Turkey for the Armenian atrocities would have been), it is hardly possible that peace could have been maintained indefinitely longer, unless Spain had gone out--a consummation hardly to be expected by peaceful means. The actual declaration of war by Congress, however, was a case of _psychologie des foules_, a genuine hysteric stampede at the last moment, which shows how unfortunate that provision of our written constitution is which takes the power of declaring war from the Executive and places it in Congress. Our Executive has behaved very well. The European nations of the Continent cannot believe that our pretense of humanity, and our disclaiming of all ideas of conquest, is sincere. It has been _absolutely_ sincere! The self-conscious feeling of our people has been entirely based in a sense of philanthropic duty, without which not a step would have been taken. And when, in its ultimatum to Spain, Congress denied any project of conquest in Cuba, it genuinely meant every word it said. But here comes in the psychologic factor: once the excitement of action gets loose, the taxes levied, the victories achieved, etc., the old human instincts will get into play with all their old strength, and the ambition and sense of mastery which our nation has will set up new demands. We shall never take Cuba; I imagine that to be very certain--unless indeed after years of unsuccessful police duty there, for that is what we have made ourselves responsible for. But Porto Rico, and even the Philippines, are not so sure. We had supposed ourselves (with all our crudity and barbarity in certain ways) a better nation morally than the rest, safe at home, and without the old savage ambition, destined to exert great international influence by throwing in our "moral weight," etc. Dreams! Human Nature is everywhere the same; and at the least temptation all the old military passions rise, and sweep everything before them. It will be interesting to see how it will end. But enough of this!--It all shows by what short steps progress is made, and it confirms the "criticist" views of the philosophy of history. I am going to a great popular meeting in Boston today where a lot of my friends are to protest against the new "Imperialism." In August I go for two months to California to do some lecturing. As I have never crossed the continent or seen the Pacific Ocean or those beautiful _parages_, I am very glad of the opportunity. The year after next (_i.e._ one year from now) begins a new year of absence from my college duties. I _may_ spend it in Europe again. In any case I shall hope to see you, for I am appointed to give the "Gifford Lectures" at Edinburgh during 1899-1901--two courses of 10 each on the philosophy of religion. A great honor.--I have also received the honor of an election as "Correspondent" of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Have I _your_ influence to thank for this? Believe me, with most sympathetic regards to Mrs. Pillon and affectionate greetings to yourself, yours most truly Wm. James. Before starting for California, James went to the Adirondack Lodge to snatch a brief holiday. One episode in this holiday can best be described by an extract from a letter to Mrs. James. _To Mrs. James._ ST. HUBERT'S INN, KEENE VALLEY, _July 9, 1898_. ...I have had an eventful 24 hours, and my hands are so stiff after it that my fingers can hardly hold the pen. I left, as I informed you by post-card, the Lodge at seven, and five hours of walking brought us to the top of Marcy--I carrying 18 lbs. of weight in my pack. As usual, I met two Cambridge acquaintances on the mountain top--"Appalachians" from Beede's. At four, hearing an axe below, I went down (an hour's walk) to Panther Lodge Camp, and there found Charles and Pauline Goldmark, Waldo Adler and another schoolboy, and two Bryn Mawr girls--the girls all dressed in boys' breeches, and cutaneously desecrated in the extreme from seven of them having been camping without a male on Loon Lake to the north of this. My guide had to serve for the party, and quite unexpectedly to me the night turned out one of the most memorable of all my memorable experiences. I was in a wakeful mood before starting, having been awake since three, and I may have slept a little during this night; but I was not aware of sleeping at all. My companions, except Waldo Adler, were all motionless. The guide had got a magnificent provision of firewood, the sky swept itself clear of every trace of cloud or vapor, the wind entirely ceased, so that the fire-smoke rose straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people round me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children, dear Harry on the wave, the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal of it in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. The two kinds of Gods have nothing in common--the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch ahead. The intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could only _tell_ the significance; the intense inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intense _appeal_ of it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you, and my relation to you part and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together; it was indeed worth coming for, and worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected. It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement. In point of fact, I can't find a single word for all that significance, and don't know what it was significant of, so there it remains, a mere boulder of _impression_. Doubtless in more ways than one, though, things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to it. In the morning at six, I shouldered my undiminished pack and went up Marcy, ahead of the party, who arrived half an hour later, and we got in here at eight [P.M.] after 10-1/2 hours of the solidest walking I ever made, and I, I think, more fatigued than I have been after any walk. We plunged down Marcy, and up Bason Mountain, led by C. Goldmark, who had, with Mr. White, blazed a trail the year before;[19] then down again, away down, and up the Gothics, not counting a third down-and-up over an intermediate spur. It was the steepest sort of work, and, as one looked from the summits, seemed sheer impossible, but the girls kept up splendidly, and were all fresher than I. It was true that they had slept like logs all night, whereas I was "on my nerves." I lost my Norfolk jacket at the last third of the course--high time to say good-bye to that possession--and staggered up to the Putnams to find Hatty Shaw[20] taking me for a tramp. Not a soul was there, but everything spotless and ready for the arrival today. I got a bath at Bowditch's bath-house, slept in my old room, and slept soundly and well, and save for the unwashable staining of my hands and a certain stiffness in my thighs, am entirely rested and well. But I don't believe in keeping it up too long, and at the Willey House will lead a comparatively sedentary life, and cultivate sleep, if I can.... W. J. The intense experience which James thus described had consequences that were not foreseen at the time. He had gone to the Adirondacks at the close of the college term in a much fatigued condition. He had been sleeping badly for some weeks, and when he started up Mount Marcy he had neuralgia in one foot; but he had characteristically determined to ignore and "bully" this ailment. Under such conditions the prolonged physical exertion of the two days' climb, aggravated by the fact that he carried a pack all the second day, was too much for a man of his years and sedentary occupations. As the summer wore on, pain or discomfort in the region of his heart became constant. He tried to persuade himself that it signified nothing and would pass away, and concealed it from his wife until mid-winter. To Howison--who was himself a confessed heart case--he wrote, "My heart has been kicking about terribly of late, stopping, and hurrying and aching and so forth, but I do not propose to give up to it too much." The fact was that the strain of the two days' climb had caused a valvular lesion that was irreparable, although not great enough seriously to curtail his activities if he had given heed to his general condition and avoided straining himself again. In August James went to California to give the lectures which have already been mentioned in a letter to Pillon. Again, these lectures were in substance the "Talks to Teachers." The next letter, written just before he left Cambridge, answers a request to him to address the Philosophical Club at the University of California. _To G. H. Howison._ Cambridge, _July 24, 1898_. DEAR HOWISON,--Your kind letter greeted me on my arrival here three days ago--but I have waited to answer it in order to determine just what my lecture's title should be. I wanted to make something entirely popular, and as it were emotional, for technicality seems to me to spell "failure" in philosophy. But the subject in the margin of my consciousness failed to make connexion with the centre, and I have fallen back on something less vital, but still, I think, sufficiently popular and practical, which you can advertise under the rather ill-chosen title of "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," if you wish. I am just back from a month of practical idleness in the Adirondacks, but such is the infirmity of my complexion that I am not yet in proper working trim. You ask me, like an angel, in what form I like to take my sociability. The spirit is willing to take it in any form, but the flesh is weak, and it runs to destruction of nerve-tissue and madness in me to go to big stand-up receptions where the people scream and breathe in each other's faces. But I know my duties; and one such reception I will gladly face. For the rest, I should infinitely prefer a chosen few at dinner. But this enterprise is going, my friend, to give you and Mrs. Howison a heap of trouble. My purpose is to arrive on the eve of the 26th. I will telegraph you the hour and train. When the lectures to the teachers are over, I will make for the Yosemite Valley, where I want to spend a fortnight if I can, and come home.... Yours ever truly, Wm. James. _To Henry James._ OCCIDENTAL HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO, _Aug. 11, 1898_. DEAR OLD HENRY,--You see I have worked my way across the Continent, and, full of the impressions of this queer place, I must overflow for a page or two to you. I saw some really grand and ferocious scenery on the Canadian Pacific, and wish I could go right back to see it again. But it doesn't mean much, on the whole, for human habitation, and the British Empire's investment in Canada is in so far forth but _scenic_. It is grand, though, in its vastness and simplicity. In Washington and Oregon the whole foreground consisted of desolation by fire. The magnificent coniferous forests burnt and burning, as they have been for years and years back. Northern California one pulverous earth-colored mass of hills and heat, with green spots produced by irrigation hardly showing on the background. I drove through a wheatfield at Harry's Uncle Christopher's on a machine, drawn by 26 mules, which cut a swathe 18 feet wide through the wheat and threw it out in bags to be taken home, as fast as the leisurely mules could walk. It is like Egypt. Down here, splendid air, and a city so indescribably odd and unique in its suggestions that I have been saying to myself all day that _you_ ought to have taken it in when you were under 30 and added it to your portraits of places. So remote and terminal, so full of the sea-port nakedness, yet so new and American, with its queer suggestions of a history based on the fifties and the sixties. But at my age those impressions are curiously weak to what they once were, and the time to travel is between one's 20th and 30th year. This hotel--an old house cleaned into newness--is redolent of '59 or '60, when it must have been built. Hideous vast stuccoed thing, with long undulating balustrades and wells and lace curtains. The fare is very good, but the servants all Irish, who seem cowed in the dining-room, and go about as if they had corns on their feet and for that reason had given up the pick and shovel.... Tomorrow, in spite of drouth and dust, I leave for the Yosemite Valley, with a young Californian philosopher, named [Charles M.] Bakewell, as companion. On the whole I prefer the works of God to those of man, and the alternative, a trip down the coast, beauties as it would doubtless show, would include too much humanity.... _To his Son Alexander._ BERKELEY, CAL., _Aug. 28, 1898_. DARLING OLD CHERUBINI,--See how brave this girl and boy are in the Yosemite Valley![21] I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house had shot a little wolf called a coyote in the early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully--and losing it--just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else we won't be worth as much as that little coyote. Your mother can find a picture of him in those green books of animals, and I want you to copy it. Your loving DAD. _To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._ MONTEREY, _Sept. 9, 1898_. DEAR OLD ROSINA,--I have seen your native state and even been driven by dear, good, sweet Hal Dibblee (who is turning into a perfectly ideal fellow) through the charming and utterly lovable place in which you all passed your childhood. (How your mother must sometimes long for it again!) Of California and its greatness, the half can never be told. I have been on a ranch in the white, bare dryness of Siskiyou County, and reaped wheat with a swathe of 18 feet wide on a machine drawn by a procession of 26 mules. I've been to Yosemite, and camped for five days in the high Sierras; I've lectured at the two universities of the state, and seen the youths and maidens lounge together at Stanford in cloisters whose architecture is purer and more lovely than aught that Italy can show. I've heard Mrs. Dibblee read letter after letter from Anita concerning your life together; and even one letter to Anita from Bay, which the former enclosed. (Dear Bay!) All this, dear old Rosina, is a "summation of stimuli" which at last carries me over the dam that has so long obstructed all my epistolary efforts in your direction. Over and over again I have been on the point of writing to you, more than once I have actually written a page or two, but something has always checked the flow, and arrested the current of the soul. What is it? I think it is this: I naturally tend, when "familiar" with what the authors of the beginning of the century used to call "a refined female," to indulge in chaffing personalities in writing to her. There is something in you that doubtfully enjoys the chaffing; and subtly feeling that, I stop. But some day, when experience shall have winnowed you with her wing; when the illusions and the hopes of youth alike are faded; when eternal principles of order are more to you than sensations that pass in a day, however exciting; when friends that know you and your roots and derivations are more satisfactory, however humdrum and hoary they be, than the handsome recent acquaintances that know nothing of you but the hour; when, in short, your being is mellowed, dulled and harmonized by time so as to be a grave, wise, deep, and discerning moral and intellectual unity (as mine is already from the height of my 40 centuries!), then, Rosina, we two shall be the most perfect of combinations, and I shall write to you every week of my life and you will be utterly unable to resist replying. That will not be, however, before you are forty years old. You are sure to come to it! For you see the truth, irrespective of persons, as few people see it; and after all, you care for that more than for anything else--and that means a rare and unusual destiny, and ultimate salvation.--But here I am, chaffing, quite against my intentions and altogether in spite of myself. The ruling passion is irresistible. Let me stop! But still I must be personal, and not write merely of the climate and productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24 hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and Bay (and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How I _should_ like to hear you hold forth about the French, their art, their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should like to hear you _talk_ French! How I should like to note the changes wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it. Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot, so that they will be worth something and definitive. I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs. Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps good for him to get the massive English impression. What times we live in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!--I keep well, though fragile as a worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election to the Institut de France as _Correspondant_. The latter is silly, but the former a serious scrape out of which I am praying all the gods to help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose. Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie--even _effleurez_ your own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother, and believe me always your affectionate W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Dec. 3, 1898_. ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND AND JOY OF MY LIVER,--I am much pleased to hear from you, for I have wished to know of your destinies, and Bakewell couldn't give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your review of me off your hands--you must experience a relief similar to that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperæsthetic, and that what you have brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its production, prove solid and deep, and reveal _ex pede_ the Hercules. Of course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe" essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of "the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "bloody but unbowed" as to the rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see; and I hope you are now free for more distant flights. I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though you say you are so much better now. You ought to be _entirely_ well and every inch a king. Remember that, _whenever_ you need a change, your bed is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness again. I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have done at least one hour of work for _myself_. If you spend your time preparing to be ready, you _never_ will be ready. Since that wonderful insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving, W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Jan. 31, 1899_. ...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable--we have both gloated over it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of thought is R.'s _essential_ element. He _wants_ it. There isn't a tight joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance, boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any _perfection_. But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine, W. J. _To Henry Rutgers Marshall._ Cambridge [_Feb. 7, 1899_?]. DEAR MARSHALL,--I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that nothing will come of it in _this_ University. Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from the analytic study of Æsthetics--harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personal _je ne sçais quaw_ left out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition--it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind--yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give. Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments. Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe." Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny _title_. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a _single_ one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall greedily read what you write. I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your "Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of psychology and morals, but which--I tremble to say it before you--on the whole _does_ disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study it. Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever, W. J. _To Henry Rutgers Marshall._ Cambridge, _Feb. 8 [1899]_. DEAR MARSHALL,--Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians. I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit interpreting the savage _soul_ to us, as he _could_, instead of using such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child," which leaves the whole insides out. Heigh ho! I have only had time to glance at the first 1/2 of your paper on Miller. I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an _ignoratio elenchi_, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions. Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever, Wm. James. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ CHOCORUA, _June 7, 1899_. DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--I got your penciled letter the day before leaving. The R.R. train seems to be a great stimulus to the acts of the higher epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you--a fact for which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house, with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive, and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative form of government possible to France in this century could have stood the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it. Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.[22] I didn't know him to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract. I haven't yet read the first and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a word of gratulation to the author for it. As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.--You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself. Ever your W. J. When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the "trail" he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a house where he could get food and a conveyance. He ought to have avoided all exertion for weeks thereafter, but he tried again to make light of what had occurred, and, on getting back to Cambridge, spent a very active few days over final arrangements for his year of absence. When his boat had sailed and the stimulus which his last duties supplied had been withdrawn, he began to discover what condition he was in. XIII 1899-1902 _Two years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures_ WHEN James sailed for Hamburg on July 15, he planned quite definitely to devote the summer to rest and the treatment of his heart, then to write out the Gifford Lectures during the winter, and to deliver them by the following spring; and, happily, could not foresee that he was to spend nearly two years in exile and idleness. For nearly six years he had driven himself beyond the true limits of his strength. Now it became evident that the strain of his second over-exertion in the Adirondacks had precipitated a complete collapse. He had been advised during the winter to go to Nauheim for a course of baths. But when he got there, the eminent specialists who examined his heart ignored his nervous prostration. He was doubtless a difficult patient to diagnose or prescribe for. Matters went from bad to worse; little by little all his plans had to be abandoned. A year went by, and a return to regular work in Cambridge was unthinkable. He was no better in the summer of 1900 than when he landed in Germany in July of 1899. His daughter had been sent to school in England. The three other children remained in America. He and Mrs. James moved about between England, Nauheim, the south of France, Switzerland and Rome, consulting a specialist in one place or trying the baths or the climate in another--with how much homesickness, and with how much courage none the less, the letters will indicate. His only systematic reading was a persistent, though frequently intermitted, exploration of religious biographies and the literature of religious conversion, in preparation for the Gifford Lectures. During the second year he managed to get one course of these lectures written out. Not until he had delivered them in Edinburgh, in May, 1901, did he know that he had turned the corner and feel as if he had begun to live again. Every letter that came to him from his family and friends at home was comforting beyond measure, and he poured out a stream of acknowledgment in long replies, which he dictated to Mrs. James. His own writing was usually limited to jottings in a note-book and to post-cards. He always had a fountain-pen and a few post-cards in his pocket, and often, when sitting in a chair in the open air, or at a little table in one of the outdoor restaurants that abound in Nauheim and in southern Europe, he would compress more news and messages into one of these little missives than most men ever get into a letter. A few of his friends at home divined his situation, and were at pains to write him regularly and fully. Letters that follow show how grateful he was for such devotion. * * * * * In this state of enforced idleness he browsed through newspapers and journals more than he had before or than he ever did again, and so his letters contained more comments on daily events. It will be clear that what was happening did not always please him. He was an individualist and a liberal, both by temperament and by reason of having grown up with the generation which accepted the doctrines of the _laissez-faire_ school in a thoroughgoing way. The Philippine policy of the McKinley administration seemed to him a humiliating desertion of the principles that America had fought for in the Revolution and the War of Emancipation. The military occupation of the Philippines, described by the President as "benevolent assimilation," and what he once called the "cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence" filled him with loathing. He saw the Republican Party in the light in which Mr. Dooley portrayed it when he represented its leaders as praying "that Providence might remain under the benevolent influence of the present administration." When McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated by the Republicans in 1900, he called them "a combination of slime and grit, soap and sand, that ought to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country." He was ready to vote for Bryan if there were no other way of turning out the administration responsible for the history of our first years in the Philippines, "although it would doubtless have been a premature victory of a very mongrel kind of reform." In the same way, the cant with which many of the supporters of England's program in South Africa extolled the Boer War in the British press provoked his irony. The uproar over the Dreyfus case was at its height. The "intellectuels," as they were called in France, the "Little Englanders" as they were nicknamed in England, and the Anti-Imperialists in his own country had his entire sympathy. The state of mind of a member of the liberal minority, observing the phase of history that was disclosing itself at the end of the century, is admirably indicated in his correspondence. * * * * * Miss Pauline Goldmark, next addressed, and her family were in the habit of spending their summers in Keene Valley, where they had a cottage that was not far from the Putnam Shanty. James had often joined forces with them for a day's climb when he was staying at the Shanty. The reader will recall that it was their party that he had joined on Mt. Marcy the year before. _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 12, 1899_. MY DEAR PAULINE,--I am afraid we are stuck here till the latter half of September. Once a donkey, always a donkey; at the Lodge in June, after some slow walks which seemed to do me no harm at all, I drifted one day up to the top of Marcy, and then (thanks to the Trail Improvement Society!) found myself in the Johns Brook Valley instead of on the Lodge trail back; and converted what would have been a three-hours' downward saunter into a seven-hours' scramble, emerging in Keene Valley at 10.15 P.M. This did me no good--quite the contrary; so I have come to Nauheim just in time. My carelessness was due to the belief that there was only one trail in the Lodge direction, so I didn't attend particularly, and when I found myself off the track (the trail soon stopped) I thought I was going to South Meadow, and didn't reascend. Anyhow I was an ass, and you ought to have been along to steer me straight. I fear we shall ascend no more acclivities together. "Bent is the tree that should have grown full straight!" You have no idea of the moral repulsiveness of this _Curort_ life. Everybody fairly revelling in disease, and abandoning themselves to it with a sort of _gusto_. "Heart," "heart," "heart," the sole topic of attention and conversation. As a "phase," however, one ought to be able to live through it, and the extraordinary nerve-rest, crawling round as we do, is beneficial. Man is never satisfied! Perhaps I shall be when the baths, etc., have had their effect. We go then straight to England.--I do hope that you are all getting what you wish in Switzerland, and that for all of you the entire adventure is proving golden. Mrs. James sends her love, and I am, as always, yours most affectionately, Wm. James. _To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens._ VILLA LUISE, BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 22, 1899_. DARLING BELLE-MÈRE,--The day seems to have come for another letter to you, though my fingers are so cold that I can hardly write. We have had a most conveniently dry season--convenient in that it doesn't coop us up in the house--but a deal of cloud and cold. Today is sunny but frigid--like late October. Altogether the difference of weather is very striking. European weather is stagnant and immovable. It is as if it got stuck, and needed a kick to start it; and although it is doubtless better for the nerves than ours, I find my soul thinking most kindly from this distance of our glorious quick passionate American climate, with its transparency and its impulsive extremes. This weather is as if fed on solid pudding. We inhabit one richly and heavily furnished bedroom, 21 x 14, with good beds and a balcony, and are rapidly making up for all our estrangement, locally speaking, in the past. It is a great "nerve-rest," though the listlessness that goes with all nerve-rest makes itself felt. Alice seems very well.... The place has wonderful adaptation to its purposes in the possession of a vast park with noble trees and avenues and incessant benches for rest; restaurants with out-of-door tables everywhere in sight; music morning, afternoon and night; and charming points to go to out of town. Cab-fare is cheap. But nothing else.... The Gifford lectures are in complete abeyance. I have word from Seth that under the circumstances the Academic Senate will be sure to grant me any delay or indulgence I may ask for; so this relieves tension. I can make nothing out yet about my heart.... So I _try_ to take long views and not fuss about temporary feelings, though I dare say I keep dear Alice worried enough by the fuss I imagine myself _not_ to make. It is a loathsome world, this medical world; and I confess that the thought of another six weeks here next year doesn't exhilarate me, in spite of the decency of all our physical conditions. I still remain faithful to Irving St. (95 and 107),[23] Chocorua, Silver Lake, and Keene Valley! We get almost no syllable of American news, in spite of the fact that we take the London "Chronicle." Pray send the "Nation" and the "Literary Digest." _Don't_ send the "Sciences" as heretofore. Let them accumulate. I think that after reception of this you had better address us care of H. J., Rye, Sussex. We shall probably be off by the 10th or 12th of Sept. I hope that public opinion is gathering black against the Philippine policy--in spite of my absence! I hope that Salter will pitch in well in the fall. The still blacker nightmare of a Dreyfus case hangs over us; and there is little time in the day save for reading the "Figaro's" full reports of the trial. Like all French happenings, it is as if they were edited expressly for literary purpose. Every "witness" so-called has a power of statement equal to that of a first-class lawyer; and the various human types that succeed each other, exhibiting their several peculiarities in full blossom, make the thing like a novel. Esterhazy seems to me the _great_ hero. How Shakespeare would have enjoyed such a fantastic scoundrel,--knowing all the secrets, saying what he pleases, mystifying all Europe, leading the whole French army (except apparently Picquart) by the nose,--a regular Shakespearean type of villain, with an insane exuberance of rhetoric and fancy about his vanities and hatreds, that literature has never given yet. It would seem incredible that the Court-Martial should condemn. Henry was evidently the spy, employed by Esterhazy, and afterwards Du Paty helped their machinations, in order not to stultify his own record at the original trial--at least this seems the plausible theory. The older generals seem merely to have been passive connivers, stupidly and obstinately holding to the original official mistake rather than surrender under fire. And such is the prestige of caste-opinion, such the solidity of the professional spirit, that, incredible as it may seem, it is still quite probable that the officers will obey the lead of their superiors, and condemn Dreyfus again. The President, Jouaust, who was supposed to be impartial, is showing an apparently bad animus against Picquart. P. is a real _hero_--a precious possession for any country. He ought to be made Minister of War; though that would doubtless produce a revolution. I suppose that Loubet will pardon Dreyfus immediately if he is recondemned. Then Dreyfus, and perhaps Loubet, will be assassinated by some Anti-Semite, and who knows what will follow? But before you get this, you will know far more about the trial than I can tell you. We long for news from the boys--not a word from Billy since he left Tacoma. I am glad their season promises to be shorter! Enough is as good as a feast! What a scattered lot we are! I hope that Margaret will be happy in Montreal. As for you in your desolation, I could almost weep for you. My only advice is that you should cling to Aleck as to a life-preserver. I trust you got the $200 I told Higginson to send you. I am mortified beyond measure by that overdrawn bank account, and do not understand it at all. Oceans of love from your affectionate son, WILLIAM. _To William M. Salter._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 11, 1899_. DEAR MACKINTIRE,--The incredible has happened, and Dreyfus, without one may say a single particle of _positive_ evidence that he was guilty, has been condemned again. The French Republic, which seemed about to turn the most dangerous corner in her career and enter on the line of political health, laying down the finest set of political precedents in her history to serve as standards for future imitation and habit, has slipped Hell-ward and all the forces of Hell in the country will proceed to fresh excesses of insolence. But I don't believe the game is lost. "Les intellectuels," thanks to the Republic, are now aggressively militant as they never were before, and will grow stronger and stronger; so we may hope. I have sent you the "Figaro" daily; but of course the reports are too long for you to have read through. The most grotesque thing about the whole trial is the pretension of awful holiness, of semi-divinity in the diplomatic documents and waste-paper-basket scraps from the embassies--a farce kept up to the very end--these same documents being, so far as they were anything (and most of them were nothing), mere records of treason, lying, theft, bribery, corruption, and every crime on the part of the diplomatic agents. Either the German and Italian governments will now publish or not publish all the details of their transactions--give the exact documents meant by the _bordereaux_ and the exact names of the French traitors. If they do not, there will be only two possible explanations: either Dreyfus's guilt, or the pride of their own sacrosanct etiquette. As it is scarcely conceivable that Dreyfus can have been guilty, their silences will be due to the latter cause. (Of course it can't be due to what they owe in honor to Esterhazy and whoever their other allies and servants may have been. E. is safe over the border, and a pension for his services will heal all his wounds. Any other person can quickly be put in similar conditions of happiness.) And they and Esterhazy will then be exactly on a par morally, actively conspiring to have an innocent man bear the burden of their own sins. By their carelessness with the documents they got Dreyfus accused, and now they abandon him, for the sake of their own divine etiquette. The breath of the nostrils of all these big institutions is crime--that is the long and short of it. We must thank God for America; and hold fast to every advantage of our position. Talk about our corruption! It is a mere fly-speck of superficiality compared with the rooted and permanent forces of corruption that exist in the European states. The only serious permanent force of corruption in America is party spirit. All the other forces are shifting like the clouds, and have no partnerships with any permanently organized ideal. Millionaires and syndicates have their immediate cash to pay, but they have no intrenched prestige to work with, like the church sentiment, the army sentiment, the aristocracy and royalty sentiment, which here can be brought to bear in favor of every kind of individual and collective crime--appealing not only to the immediate pocket of the persons to be corrupted, but to the ideals of their imagination as well.... My dear Mack, we "intellectuals" in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions. _Every_ great institution is perforce a means of corruption--whatever good it may also do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be found.--I have vomited all this out upon you in the hope that it may wake a responsive echo. One must do _something_ to work off the effect of the Dreyfus sentence. I rejoice immensely in the purchase [on our behalf] of the two pieces of land [near Chocorua], and pine for the day when I can get back to see them. If all the same to you, I wish that you would buy Burke's in your name, and Mother-in-law Forrest's in her name. But let this be exactly as each of you severally prefers. We leave here in a couple of days, I imagine. I am better; but I can't tell how much better for a few weeks yet. I hope that you will smite the ungodly next winter. What a glorious gathering together of the forces for the great fight there will be. It seems to me as if the proper tactics were to pound McKinley--put the whole responsibility on him. It is he who by his purely drifting "non-entanglement" policy converted a splendid opportunity into this present necessity of a conquest of extermination. It is he who has warped us from our continuous national habit, which, if we repudiate him, it will not be impossible to resume. Affectionately thine, Mary's, Aleck's, Dinah's, Augusta's,[24] and everyone's, W. J. P.S. Damn it, America doesn't know the meaning of the word corruption compared with Europe! Corruption is so permanently organized here that it isn't thought of as such--it is so transient and shifting in America as to make an outcry whenever it appears. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 17, 1899_. ...In two or three days more I shall be discharged (in very decent shape, I trust) and after ten days or so of rigorously prescribed "Nachkur" in the cold and rain of Switzerland (we have seen the sun only in short but entrancing glimpses since Sept. 1, and you know what bad weather is when it once begins in Europe), we shall pick up our Peggy at Vevey, and proceed to Lamb House, Rye, _über_ Paris, with all possible speed. God bless the American climate, with its transparent, passionate, impulsive variety and headlong fling. There are deeper, slower tones of earnestness and moral gravity here, no doubt, but ours is more like youth and youth's infinite and touching promise. God bless America in general! _Conspuez_ McKinley and the Republican party and the Philippine war, and the Methodists, and the voices, etc., as much as you please, but bless the innocence. Talk of corruption! We don't know what the word corruption means at home, with our improvised and shifting agencies of crude pecuniary bribery, compared with the solidly intrenched and permanently organized corruptive geniuses of monarchy, nobility, church, army, that penetrate the very bosom of the higher kind as well as the lower kind of people in all the European states (except Switzerland) and sophisticate their motives away from the impulse to straightforward handling of any simple case. _Temoin_ the Dreyfus case! But no matter! Of all the forms of mental crudity, that of growing earnest over international comparisons is probably the most childish. Every nation has its ideals which are a dead secret to other nations, and it has to develop in its own way, in touch with them. It can only be judged by itself. If each of us does as well as he can in his own sphere at home, he will do all he _can_ do; that is why I hate to remain so long abroad.... We have been having a visit from an extraordinary Pole named Lutoslawski, 36 years old, author of philosophical writings in seven different languages,--"Plato's Logic," in English (Longmans) being his chief work,--and knower of several more, handsome, and to the last degree genial. He has a singular philosophy--the philosophy of friendship. He takes in dead seriousness what most people admit, but only half-believe, viz., that we are _Souls_ (Zoolss, he pronounces it), that souls are immortal, and agents of the world's destinies, and that the chief concern of a soul is to get ahead by the help of other souls with whom it can establish confidential relations. So he spends most of his time writing letters, and will send 8 sheets of reply to a post-card--that is the exact proportion of my correspondence with him. Shall I rope you in, Fanny? He has a great chain of friends and correspondents in all the countries of Europe. The worst of them is that they think a secret imparted to one may at his or her discretion become, _de proche en proche_, the property of all. He is a _wunderlicher Mensch_: abstractly his scheme is divine, but there is something on which I can't yet just lay my defining finger that makes one feel that there is some need of the corrective and critical and arresting judgment in his manner of carrying it out. These Slavs seem to be the great radical livers-out of their theories. Good-bye, dearest Fanny.... Your affectionate W. J. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _Oct. 5, 1899_. DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--You see where at last we have arrived, at the end of the first _étape_ of this pilgrimage--the second station of the cross, so to speak--with the Continent over, and England about to begin. The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures--all exceedingly tiny (so that one wonders how _families_ ever could have been reared in most of the houses) and neat and _zierlich_ to the last degree. _Refinement_ in architecture certainly consists in narrow trim and the absence of heavy mouldings. Modern Germany is incredibly bad from that point of view--much worse, apparently, than America. But the German people are a good safe fact for great powers to be intrusted to--earnest and serious, and pleasant to be with, as we found them, though it was humiliating enough to find how awfully imperfect were one's powers of conversing in their language. French not much better. I remember nothing of this extreme mortification in old times, and am inclined to think that it is due less to loss of ability to speak, than to the fact that, as you grow older, you speak better English, and expect more of yourself in the way of accomplishment. I am sure _you_ spoke no such English as now, in the seventies, when you came to Cambridge! And how could I, as yet untrained by conversation with you? Seven mortal weeks did we spend at the _Curort_, Nauheim, for an infirmity of the heart which I contracted, apparently, not much more than a year ago, and which now must be borne, along with the rest of the white man's burden, until additional visits to Nauheim have removed it altogether for ordinary practical purposes. N. was a sweetly pretty spot, but I longed for more activity. A glorious week in Switzerland, solid in its sometimes awful, sometimes beefy beauty; two days in Paris, where I could gladly have stayed the winter out, merely for the fun of the sight of the intelligent and interesting streets; then hither, where H. J. has a real little _bijou_ of a house and garden, and seems absolutely adapted to his environment, and very well and contented in the leisure to write and to read which the place affords. In a few days we go almost certainly to the said H. J.'s apartment, still unlet, in London, where we shall in all probability stay till January, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, or till such later date as shall witness the completion of the awful Gifford job, at which I have not been able to write one line since last January. I long for the definitive settlement and ability to get to work. I am very glad indeed, too, to be in an English atmosphere again. Of course it will conspire better with my writing tasks, and after all it is more congruous with one's nature and one's inner ideals. Still, one loves America above all things, for her youth, her greenness, her plasticity, innocence, good intentions, friends, everything. Je veux que mes cendres reposent sur les bords du Charles, au milieu de ce bon peuple de Harvarr Squerre que j'ai tant aimé. That is what I say, and what Napoleon B. would have said, had his life been enriched by your and my educational and other experiences--poor man, he knew too little of life, had never even heard of us, whilst we have heard of him! Seriously speaking, though, I believe that international comparisons are a great waste of time--at any rate, international judgments and passings of sentence are. Every nation has ideals and difficulties and sentiments which are an impenetrable secret to one not of the blood. Let them alone, let each one work out its own salvation on its own lines. They talk of the decadence of France. The hatreds, and the _coups de gueule_ of the newspapers there are awful. But I doubt if the better ideals were ever so aggressively strong; and I fancy it is the fruit of the much decried republican régime that they have become so. My brother represents English popular opinion as less cock-a-whoop for war than newspaper accounts would lead one to imagine; but I don't know that he is in a good position for judging. I hope if they do go to war that the Boers will give them fits, and I heartily emit an analogous prayer on behalf of the Philippinos. I have had pleasant news of Beverly, having had letters both from Fanny Morse and Paulina Smith. I hope that your summer has been a good one, that work has prospered and that Society has been less _énervante_ and more nutritious for the higher life of the Soul than it sometimes is. _We_ have met but one person of any accomplishments or interest all summer. But I have managed to read a good deal about religion, and religious people, and care less for accomplishments, except where (as in you) they go with a sanctified heart. Abundance of accomplishments, in an unsanctified heart, only make one a more accomplished devil. Good bye, angelic friend! We both send love and best wishes, both to you and Mr. Whitman, and I am as ever yours affectionately, W. J. _To Thomas Davidson._ 34 DE VERE GARDENS, LONDON, _Nov. 2, 1899_. DEAR OLD T. D.,--A recent letter from Margaret Gibbens says that you have gone to New York in order to undergo a most "radical operation." I need not say that my thoughts have been with you, and that I have felt anxiety mixed with my hopes for you, ever since. I do indeed hope that, whatever the treatment was, it has gone off with perfect success, and that by this time you are in the durable enjoyment of relief, and nerves and everything upon the upward track. It has always seemed to me that, were I in a similar plight, I should choose a kill-or-cure operation rather than anything merely palliative--so poisonous to one's whole mental and moral being is the irritation and worry of the complaint. It would truly be a spectacle for the Gods to see you rising like a phoenix from your ashes again, and shaking off even the memory of disaster like dew-drops from a lion's mane, etc.--and I hope the spectacle will be vouchsafed to us men also, and that you will be presiding over Glenmore as if nothing had happened, different from the first years, save a certain softening of your native ferocity of heart, and gentleness towards the shortcomings of weaker people. Dear old East Hill![25] I shall never forget the beauty of the morning (it had rained the night before) when I took my bath in the brook, before driving down to Westport one day last June. We got your letter at Nauheim, a sweet safe little place, made for invalids, to which it took long to reconcile me on that account. But nous en avons vu bien d'autres depuis, and from my present retirement in my brother's still unlet flat (he living at Rye), Nauheim seems to me like New York for bustle and energy. My heart, in short, has gone back upon me badly since I was there, and my doctor, Bezley Thorne, the first specialist here, and a man who inspires me with great confidence, is trying to tide me over the crisis, by great quiet, in addition to a dietary of the strictest sort, and more Nauheim baths, _à domicile_. Provided I can only get safely out of the Gifford scrape, the deluge has leave to come.--Write, dear old T. D., and tell how you are, and let it be good news if possible. Give much love to the Warrens, and believe me always affectionately yours, Wm. James. The woman thou gavest unto me comes out strong as a nurse, and treats me much better than I deserve. _To John C. Gray._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] LONDON, _Nov. 23, 1899_. DEAR JOHN,--A week ago I learnt from the "Nation"--strange to have heard it in no directer way!--that dear old John Ropes had turned his back on us and all this mortal tragi-comedy. No sooner does one get abroad than that sort of thing begins. I am deeply grieved to think of never seeing or hearing old J. C. R. again, with his manliness, good-fellowship, and cheeriness, and idealism of the right sort, and can't hold in any longer from expression. You, dear John, seem the only fitting person for me to condole with, for you will miss him most tremendously. Pray write and tell me some details of the manner of his death. I hope he didn't suffer much. Write also of your own personal and family fortunes and give my love to the members of our dining club collectively and individually, when you next meet. I have myself been shut up in a sick room for five weeks past, seeing hardly anyone but my wife and the doctor, a bad state of the heart being the cause. We shall be at West Malvern in ten days, where I hope to begin to mend. Hurrah for Henry Higginson and his gift[26] to the University! I think the Club cannot fail to be useful if they make it democratic enough. I hope that Roland is enjoying Washington, but not so far transubstantiated into a politician as to think that McKinley & Co. are the high-water mark of human greatness up to date. John Ropes, more than most men, seems as if he would be natural to meet again. Please give our love to Mrs. Gray, and believe me, affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ LAMB HOUSE, _Dec. 23, 1899_. DEAREST FANNY,--About a week ago I found myself thinking a good deal about you. I may possibly have begun by wondering how it came that, after showing such a spontaneous tendency towards that "clandestine correspondence" early in the season, you should recently, in spite of pathetic news about me, and direct personal appeals, be showing such great epistolary reserve. I went on to great lengths about you; and ended by realizing your existence, and its significance, as it were, very acutely. I composed a letter to you in my mind, whilst lying awake, dwelling in a feeling manner on the fact that human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia; they contribute nothing empirical to the relation, treating it as something transcendental and metaphysical altogether; whereas in truth it deserves from hour to hour the most active care and nurture and devotion. "There's that Fanny," thought I, "the rarest and most precious, perhaps, of all the phenomena that enter into the circle of my experience. I take her for granted; I seldom see her--she _has never passed a night in our house!_[27] and yet of all things she is the one that probably deserves the closest and most unremitting attention on my part. This transcendental relation of persons to each other in the absolute won't do! I must write to Fanny and tell her, in spite of her deprecations, just how perfect and rare and priceless a fact I know her existence in this Universe eternally to be. This very morrow I will dictate such a letter to Alice." The morrow came, and several days succeeded, and brought each its impediment with it, so that letter doesn't get written till today. And now Alice, who had suddenly to take Peggy (who is with us for ten days) out to see a neighbor's little girl, comes in; so I will give the pen to her. [Remainder of letter dictated to Mrs. James] Sunday, 24th. Brother Harry and Peggy came in with Alice last evening, so my letter got postponed till this morning. What I was going to say was this. The day before yesterday we received in one bunch seven letters from you, dating from the 20th of October to the 8th of December, and showing that you, at any rate, had been alive to the duty of actively nourishing friendship by deeds.... Your letters were sent to Baring Brothers, instead of Brown, Shipley and Co., and it was a mercy that we ever got them at all. You are a great letter-writer inasmuch as your pen flows on, giving out easily such facts and feelings and thoughts as form the actual contents of your day, so that one gets a live impression of concrete reality. _My_ letters, I find, tend to escape into humorisms, abstractions and flights of fancy, which are not nutritious things to impart to friends thousands of miles away who wish to realize the facts of your private existence. We are now received into the shelter of H. J.'s "Lamb House," where we have been a week, having found West Malvern (where the doctor sent me after my course of baths) rather too bleak a retreat for the drear-nighted December. (Heaven be praised! we have just lived down the solstice after which the year always seems a brighter, hopefuller thing.) Harry's place is a most exquisite collection of quaint little stage properties, three quarters of an acre of brick-walled English garden, little brick courts and out-houses, old-time kitchen and offices, paneled chambers and tiled fire-places, but all very simple and on a small scale. Its host, soon to become its proprietor, leads a very lonely life but seems in perfect equilibrium therewith, placing apparently his interest more and more in the operations of his fancy. His health is good, his face calm, his spirits equable, and he will doubtless remain here for many years to come, with an occasional visit to London. He has spoken of you with warm affection and is grateful for the letters which you send him in spite of the lapse of years.... I have resigned my Gifford lectureship, but they will undoubtedly grant me indefinite postponement. I have also asked for a second year of absence from Harvard, which of course will be accorded. If I improve, I may be able to give my first Gifford course next year. I can do no work whatsoever at present, but through the summer and half through the fall was able to do a good deal of reading in religious biography. Since July, in fact, my only companions have been saints, most excellent, though sometimes rather lop-sided company. In a general manner I can see my way to a perfectly bully pair of volumes, the first an objective study of the "Varieties of Religious Experience," the second, my own last will and testament, setting forth the philosophy best adapted to normal religious needs. I hope I may be spared to get the thing down on paper. So far my progress has been rather downhill, but the last couple of days have shown a change which possibly may be the beginning of better things. I mean to take great care of myself from this time on. In another week or two we hope to move to a climate (possibly near Hyères) where I may sit more out of doors. Gathering some strength there, I trust to make for Nauheim in May. If I am benefited there, we shall stay over next winter; otherwise we return by midsummer. Were Alice not holding the pen, I should celebrate her unselfish devotion, etc., and were I not myself dictating, I should celebrate my own uncomplaining patience and fortitude. As it is, I leave you to imagine both. Both are simply beautiful! ...There, dear Fanny, this is all I can do today in return for your seven glorious epistles. Take a heartful of love and gratitude from both of us. Remember us most affectionately to your Mother and Mary. Write again soon, I pray you, but always to _Brown, Shipley and Co._ Stir up Jim Putnam to write when he can, and believe me, lovingly yours, Wm. James. _To Mrs. Glendower Evans._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] COSTEBELLE, HYÈRES, _Jan. 17, 1900_. DEAR BESSIE,--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 anybody else's--though I wouldn't have anything in this construed prejudicial to Fanny Morse. Bowed as I am by the heaviest of matrimonial chains, ever dependent for expression on Alice here, 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. She has told you correctly all the outward facts. I feel within a week past as if I might really be taking a turn for the better, and I know you will be glad. I have, in the last days, gone so far as to read Royce's book[28] from cover to cover, a task made easy by the familiarity of the thought, as well as the flow of the style. It is a charming production--it is odd that the adjectives "charming" and "pretty" emerge so strongly to characterize my impression. R. has got himself much more organically together than he ever did before, the result being, in its _ensemble_, a highly individual and original _Weltanschauung_, well-fitted to be the storm-centre of much discussion, and to form a wellspring of suggestion and education for the next generation of thought in America. But it makes youthful anew the paradox of philosophy--so trivial and so ponderous at once. The book leaves a total effect on you like a picture--a summary impression of charm and grace as light as a breath; yet to bring forth that light nothing less than Royce's enormous organic temperament and technical equipment, and preliminary attempts, were required. The book consolidates an impression which I have never before got except by glimpses, that Royce's system is through and through to be classed as a light production. It is a charming, romantic sketch; and it is only by handling it after the manner of a sketch, keeping it within sketch technique, that R. can make it very impressive. In the few places where he tries to grip and reason close, the effect is rather disastrous, to my mind. But I do think of Royce now in a more or less settled way as primarily a sketcher in philosophy. Of course the sketches of some masters are worth more than the finished pictures of others. But stop! if this was the kind of letter I meant to write to you, it is no wonder that I found myself unable to begin weeks ago. My excuse is that I only finished the book two hours ago, and my mind was full to overflowing. Next Monday we are expecting to move into the neighboring Château de Carqueiranne, which my friend Professor Richet of Paris has offered conjointly to us and the Fred Myerses, who will soon arrive. A whole country house in splendid grounds and a perfect Godsend under the conditions. If I can only bear the talking to the Myerses without too much fatigue! But that also I am sure will come. Our present situation is enviable enough. A large bedroom with a balcony high up on the vast hotel façade; a terrace below it graveled with 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 gray-green olive groves bordered by great salt marshes with salt works on them, shut in from the sea by the 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, Wm. James. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] HOTEL D' ALBION, COSTEBELLE, HYÈRES, _Jan. 18, 1900_. DARLING MILLER,--Last night arrived your pathetically sympathetic letter in comment on the news you had just received of my dropping out for the present from the active career. I want you to understand how deeply I value your unflagging feeling of friendship, and how much we have been touched by this new expression of it.... My strength and spirits are coming back to me with the open-air life, and I begin to feel quite differently towards the future. Even if this amelioration does not develop fast, it is a check to the deterioration, and shows that curative forces are still there. I look perfectly well at present, and that of itself is a very favorable sign. In a couple of weeks I mean to begin the Gifford lectures, writing, say, a page a day, and having all next year before me empty, am very likely to get, at any rate, the first course finished. A letter from Seth last night told me that the Committee [on the Gifford Lectureship] had refused my resignation and simply shoved my appointment forward by one year. So be of good cheer, Miller; we shall yet fight the good fight, sometimes side by side, sometimes agin one another, as merrily as if no interruption had occurred. Show this to Harry, to whom his mother will write today. We enjoyed Royce's visit very much, and yesterday I finished reading his book, which I find perfectly charming as a composition, though as far as cogent reasoning goes, it leaks at every joint. It is, nevertheless, a big achievement in the line of philosophic fancy-work, perhaps the most important of all except religious fancy-work. He has got himself together far more intricately than ever before, and ought, after this, to be recognized by the world according to the measure of his real importance. To me, however, the book has brought about a curious settlement in my way of classing Royce. In spite of the great technical freight he carries, and his extraordinary mental vigor, he belongs essentially among the lighter skirmishers of philosophy. A sketcher and popularizer, not a pile-driver, foundation-layer, or wall-builder. Within his class, of course, he is simply magnificent. It all goes with his easy temperament and rare good-nature in discussion. The subject is not really vital to him, it is just fancy-work. All the same I do hope that this book and its successor will prove a great ferment in our philosophic schools. Only with schools and living masters can philosophy _bloom_ in a country, in a generation. No more, dear Miller, but endless thanks. All you tell me of yourself deeply interests me. I am deeply sorry about the eyes. Are you sure it is not a matter for glasses? With much love from both of us. Your ever affectionate, W. J. _To Francis Boott._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] CHÂTEAU DE CARQUEIRANNE, _Jan. 31, 1900_. DEAR OLD FRIEND,--Every day for a month past I have said to Alice, "Today we must get off a letter to Mr. Boott"; but every day the available strength was less than the call upon it. Yours of the 28th December reached us duly at Rye and was read at the cheerful little breakfast table. I must say that you are the only person who has caught the proper tone for sympathizing with an invalid's feelings. Everyone else says, "We are glad to think that you are by this time in splendid condition, richly enjoying your rest, and having a great success at Edinburgh"--this, where what one craves is mere pity for one's unmerited sufferings! _You_ say, "it is a great disappointment, more I should think than you can well bear. I wish you could give up the whole affair and turn your prow toward home." That, dear Sir, is the proper note to strike--la voix du coeur qui seul au coeur arrive; and I thank you for recognizing that it is a case of agony and patience. I, for one, should be too glad to turn my prow homewards, in spite of all our present privileges in the way of simplified life, and glorious climate. What wouldn't I give at this moment to be partaking of one of your recherchés déjeuners à la fourchette, ministered to by the good Kate. From the bed on which I lie I can "sense" it as if present--the succulent roast pork, the apple sauce, the canned asparagus, the cranberry pie, the dates, the "To Kalon,"[29]--above all the _rire en barbe_ of the ever-youthful host. Will they ever come again? Don't understand me to be disparaging our present meals which, cooked by a broadbuilt sexagenarian Provençale, leave nothing to be desired. Especially is the fish good and the artichokes, and the stewed lettuce. Our _commensaux_, the Myerses, form a good combination. The house is vast and comfortable and the air just right for one in my condition, neither relaxing nor exciting, and floods of sunshine. Do you care much about the war? For my part I think Jehovah has run the thing about right, so far; though on utilitarian grounds it will be very likely better if the English win. When we were at Rye an interminable controversy raged about a national day of humiliation and prayer. I wrote to the "Times" to suggest, in my character of traveling American, that both sides to the controversy might be satisfied by a service arranged on principles suggested by the anecdote of the Montana settler who met a grizzly so formidable that he fell on his knees, saying, "O Lord, I hain't never yet asked ye for help, and ain't agoin' to ask ye for none now. But for pity's sake, O Lord, don't help the bear." The solemn "Times" never printed my letter and thus the world lost an admirable epigram. You, I know, will appreciate it. Mrs. Gibbens speaks with great pleasure of your friendly visits, and I should think you might find Mrs. Merriman good company. I hope you are getting through the winter without any bronchial trouble, and I hope that neither the influenza nor the bubonic plague has got to Cambridge yet. The former is devastating Europe. If you see dear Dr. Driver, give him our warmest regards. One ought to stay among one's own people. I seem to be mending--though very slowly, and the least thing knocks me down. This noon I am still in bed, a little too much talking with the Myerses yesterday giving me a strong pectoral distress which is not yet over. This dictation begins to hurt me, so I will stop. My spirits now are first-rate, which is a great point gained. Good-bye, dear old man! We both send our warmest love and are, ever affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Hugo Münsterberg._ CARQUEIANNE, _March 13, 1900_. DEAR MÜNSTERBERG,--Your letter of the 7th "ult." was a most delightful surprise--all but the part of it which told of your being ill again--and of course the news of poor Solomons's death was a severe shock.... As regards Solomons, it is pathetically tragic, and I hope that you will send me full details. There was something so lonely and self-sustaining about poor little S., that to be snuffed out like this before he had fairly begun to live in the eyes of the world adds a sort of tragic dramatic unity to his young career. Certainly the _keenest_ intellect we ever had, and one of the loftiest characters! But there was always a mysterious side to me about his mind: he appeared so critical and destructive, and yet kept alluding all the while to ethical and religious ideals of his own which he wished to live for, and of which he never vouchsafed a glimpse to anyone else. He was the only student I have ever had of whose criticisms I felt afraid: and that was partly because I never quite understood the region from which they came, and with the authority of which he spoke. His surface thoughts, however, of a scientific order, were extraordinarily _treffend_ and clearly expressed; in fact, the way in which he went to the heart of a subject in a few words was masterly. Of course he must have left, apart from his thesis, a good deal of MS. fit for publication. I have not seen our philosophical periodicals since leaving home. Have any parts of his thesis already appeared? If not, the whole thing should be published as "Monograph Supplement" to the "Psychological Review," and his papers gone over to see what else there may be. An adequate obituary of him ought also to be written. Who knew him most intimately? I think the obituary and a portrait ought also to be posted in the laboratory. Can you send me the address of his mother?--I think his father is dead. I should also like to write a word about him to Miss S----, if you can give me her address. If we had foreseen this early end to poor little Solomons, how much more we should have made of him, and how considerate we should have been! It pleases me much to think of so many other good young fellows, as you report them, in the laboratory this year. How many candidates for Ph.D.? How glad I am to be clear of those examinations, certainly the most disagreeable part of the year's work.... _To George H. Palmer._ CARQUEIRANNE, _Apr. 2, 1900_. GLORIOUS OLD PALMER,--I had come to the point of feeling that my next letter _must_ be to you, when in comes your delightful "favor" of the 18th, with all its news, its convincing clipping, and its enclosures from Bakewell and Sheldon. I have had many impulses to write to Bakewell, but they have all aborted--my powers being so small and so much _in Anspruch genommen_ by correspondence already under way. I judge him to be well and happy. What think you of his wife? I suppose she is no relation of yours. I shouldn't think any of your three candidates would do for that conventional Bryn Mawr. She stoneth the prophets, and I wish she would get X---- and get stung. He made a _deplorable_ impression on me many years ago. The only comment _I_ heard when I gave my address there lately (the last one in my "Talks") was that A---- had hoped for something more technical and psychological! Nevertheless, some good girls seem to come out at Bryn Mawr. I am awfully sorry that Perry is out of place. Unless he gets something good, it seems to me that we ought to get him for a course in Kant. He is certainly the soundest, most normal all-round man of our recent production. Your list for next year interests me muchly. I am glad of Münsterberg's and Santayana's new courses, and hope they'll be good. I'm glad you're back in Ethics and glad that Royce has "Epistemology"--portentous name, and small result, in my opinion, but a substantive _discipline_ which ought, _par le temps qui court_, to be treated with due formality. I look forward with eagerness to his new volume.[30] What a colossal feat he has performed in these two years--all thrown in by the way, as it were. Certainly Gifford lectures are a good institution for stimulating production. They have stimulated me so far to produce two lectures of wishy-washy generalities. What is that for a "showing" in six months of absolute leisure? The second lecture used me up so that I must be off a good while again. No! dear Palmer, the best I can possibly hope for at Cambridge after my return is to be able to carry one half-course. So make all calculations accordingly. As for Windelband, how can I ascertain anything except by writing to him? I shall see no one, nor go to any University environment. My impression is that we must go in for budding genius, if we seek a European. If an American, we can get a _sommité_! But who? in either case? Verily there is room at the top. S---- seems to be the only Britisher worth thinking of. I imagine we had better train up our own men. A----, B----, C----, either would no doubt do, especially A---- if his health improves. D---- is our last card, from the point of view of policy, no doubt, but from that of inner organization it seems to me that he may have too many points of coalescence with both Münsterberg and Royce, especially the latter. The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book.[31] Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our students now could begin really to understand what Royce means with his voluntaristic-pluralistic monism, what Münsterberg means with his dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg. have had any close mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?), what I mean by my crass pluralism, what you mean by your ethereal idealism, that these are so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting for, we should have a genuine philosophic universe at Harvard. The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas! that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other. I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's _style_ to be entirely spontaneous. But it has curious classic echoes. Whole pages of pure Hume in style; others of pure Renan. Nevertheless, how fantastic a philosophy!--as if the "world of values" _were_ independent of existence. It is only as _being_, that one thing is better than another. The idea of darkness is as good as that of light, as ideas. There is more value in light's _being_. And the exquisite consolation, when you have ascertained the badness of all fact, in knowing that badness is inferior to goodness, to the end--it only rubs the pessimism in. A man whose egg at breakfast turns out always bad says to himself, "Well, bad and good are not the same, anyhow." That is just the trouble! Moreover, when you come down to the facts, what do your harmonious and integral ideal systems prove to be? in the concrete? Always things burst by the growing content of experience. Dramatic unities; laws of versification; ecclesiastical systems; scholastic doctrines. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman and Browning ten times over, much as the perverse ugliness of the latter at times irritates me, and intensely as I have enjoyed Santayana's attack. The barbarians are in the line of mental growth, and those who do insist that the ideal and the real are dynamically continuous are those by whom the world is to be saved. But I'm nevertheless delighted that the other view, always existing in the world, should at last have found so splendidly impertinent an expression among ourselves. I have meant to write to Santayana; but on second thoughts, and to save myself, I will just ask you to send him this. It saves him from what might be the nuisance of having to reply, and on my part it has the advantage of being more free-spoken and direct. He is certainly an _extraordinarily distingué_ writer. Thank him for existing! As a contrast, read Jack Chapman's "Practical Agitation." The other pole of thought, and a style all splinters--but a gospel for our rising generation--I hope it will have its effect. Send me your Noble lectures. I don't see how you could risk it without a MS. If you did fail (which I doubt) you deserved to. Anyhow the printed page makes everything good. I can no more! Adieu! How is Mrs. Palmer this winter? I hope entirely herself again. You are impartially silent of her and of my wife! The "Transcript" continues to bless us. We move from this hospitable roof to the hotel at Costebelle today. Thence after a fortnight to Geneva, and in May to Nauheim once more, to be reëxamined and sentenced by Schott. Affectionately yours, W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ COSTEBELLE, _Apr. 12, 1900_. DEAREST FANNY,--Your letters continue to rain down upon us with a fidelity which makes me sure that, however it may once have been, _now_, on the principle of the immortal Monsieur Perrichon, we must be firmly rooted in your affections. You can never "throw over" anybody for whom you have made such sacrifices. All qualms which I might have in the abstract about the injury we must be inflicting on so busy a Being by making her, through our complaints of poverty, agony, and exile, keep us so much "on her mind" as to tune us up every two or three days by a long letter to which she sacrifices all her duties to the family and state, disappear, moreover, when I consider the character of the letters themselves. They are so easy, the facts are so much the immediate out-bubblings of the moment, and the delicious philosophical reflexions so much like the spontaneous breathings of the soul, that the _effort_ is manifestly at the zero-point, and into the complex state of affection which necessarily arises in you for the objects of so much loving care, there enter none of those curious momentary arrows of impatience and vengefulness which might make others say, if they were doing what you do for us, that they wished we were dead or in some way put beyond reach, so that our eternal "appeal" might stop. No, Fanny! we have no repinings and feel no responsibilities towards you, but accept you and your letters as the gifts you are. The infrequency of our answering proves this fact; to which you in turn must furnish the correlative, if the occasion comes. On the day when you temporarily hate us, or don't "feel like" the usual letter, don't let any thought of inconsistency with your past acts worry you about not taking up the pen. Let us go; though it be for weeks and months--I shall know you will come round again. "Neither heat nor frost nor thunder shall ever do away, I ween, the marks of that which once hath been." And to think that you should never have spent a night, and only once taken a meal, in our house! When we get back, we must see each other daily, and may the days of both of us be right long in the State of Massachusetts! Bless her! I got a letter from J. J. Chapman praising her strongly the other day. And sooth to say the "Transcript" and the "Springfield Republican," the reception of whose "weeklies" has become one of the solaces of my life, do make a first-rate showing for her civilization. One can't just say what "tone" consists in, but these papers hold their own excellently in comparison with the English papers. There is far less alertness of mind in the general make-up of the latter; and the "respectability" of the English editorial columns, though it shows a correcter literary drill, is apt to be due to a remorseless longitude of commonplace conventionality that makes them deadly dull. (The "Spectator" appears to be the only paper with a nervous system, in England--that of a _carnassier_ at present!) The English people seem to have positively a passionate hunger for this mass of prosy stupidity, never less than a column and a quarter long. The Continental papers of course are "nowhere." As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the "dark ages" being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of publicity"; but it is the same fight, of reason and goodness against stupidity and passions; and it must be fought through to the same kind of success. But it means the reëducating of perhaps twenty more generations; and by that time some altogether new kind of institutional opportunity for the Devil will have been evolved. _April_ 13th. I had to stop yesterday.... Six months ago, I shouldn't have thought it possible that a life deliberately founded on pottering about and dawdling through the day would be endurable or even possible. I have attained such skill that I doubt if my days ever at any time seemed to glide by so fast. But it corrodes one's soul nevertheless. I scribble a little in bed every morning, and have reached page 48 of my third Gifford lecture--though Lecture II, alas! must be rewritten entirely. The conditions don't conduce to an energetic grip of the subject, and I am afraid that what I write is pretty slack and not what it would be if my vital tone were different. The problem I have set myself is a hard one: _first_, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life--I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and _second_, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is _my_ religious act. We got a visit the other day from [a Scottish couple here who have heard that I am to give the Gifford lectures]; and two days ago went to afternoon tea with them at their hotel, next door. _She_ enclosed a tract (by herself) in the invitation, and proved to be a [mass] of holy egotism and conceit based on professional invalidism and self-worship. I wish my sister Alice were there to "react" on her with a description! Her husband, apparently weak, and the slave of her. No talk but evangelical talk. It seemed assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one of Moody's partners, and it gave me rather a foretaste of what the Edinburgh atmosphere may be like. Well, I shall enjoy sticking a knife into its gizzard--if atmospheres have gizzards? Blessed be Boston--probably the freest place on earth, that isn't merely heathen and sensual. I have been supposing, as one always does, that you "ran in" to the Putnams' every hour or so, and likewise they to No. 12. But your late allusion to the telephone and the rarity of your seeing Jim [Putnam] reminded me of the actual conditions--absurd as they are. (Really you and we are nearer together now at this distance than we have ever been.) Well, let Jim see this letter, if you care to, flattering him by saying that it is more written for him than for you (which it certainly has not been till this moment!), and thanking him for existing in this naughty world. His account of the Copernican revolution (studento-centric) in the Medical School is highly exciting, and I am glad to hear of the excellent little Cannon becoming so prominent a reformer. Speaking of reformers, do you see Jack Chapman's "Political Nursery"? of which the April number has just come. (I have read it and taken my bed-breakfast during the previous page of this letter, though you may not have perceived the fact.) If not, _do_ subscribe to it; it is awful fun. He just looks at things, and tells the truth about them--a strange thing even to _try_ to do, and he doesn't always succeed. Office 141 Broadway, $1.00 a year. Fanny, you won't be reading as far as this in this interminable letter, so I stop, though 100 pent-up things are seeking to be said. The weather has still been so cold whenever the sun is withdrawn that we have delayed our departure for Geneva to the 22nd--a week later. We make a short visit to our friends the Flournoys (a couple of days) and then proceed towards Nauheim _via_ Heidelberg, where I wish to consult the great Erb about the advisability of more baths in view of my nervous complications, before the great Schott examines me again. I do wish I could send for Jim for a consultation. Good-bye, dearest and best of Fannys. I hope your Mother is wholly well again. Much love to her and to Mary Elliot. It interested me to hear of Jack E.'s great operation. Yours ever, W. J. _To his Son Alexander._ [GENEVA, _circa May 3, 1900_.] DEAR FRANÇOIS,--Here we are in Geneva, at the Flournoys'--dear people and splendid children. I wish Harry could marry Alice, Billy marry Marguerite, and you marry Ariane-Dorothée--the absolutely jolliest and beautifullest 3-year old I ever saw. I am trying to get you engaged! I enclose pictures of the dog. Ariane-Dorothée r-r-r-olls her r-r-r's like fury. I got your picture of the elephant--very good. Draw everything you see, no matter how badly, trying to notice how the lines run--one line every day!--just notice it and draw it, no matter how badly, and at the end of the year you'll be s'prised to see how well you can draw. Tell Billy to get you a big blank book at the Coöp., and every day take one page, just drawing down on it some _thing_, or _dog_, or _horse_, or _man_ or _woman_, or _part_ of a man or woman, which you have looked at that day just for the purpose, to see how the lines run. I bet the last page of that book will be better than the first! Do this for my sake. Kiss your dear old Grandma. P'r'aps, we shall get home this summer after all. In two or three days I shall see a doctor and know more about myself. Will let you know. Keep motionless and listen as much as you can. Take in things without speaking--it'll make you a better man. Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosopher like me and write books. It is easy enuff, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books, and write it down. Always your loving, DAD. At this time James's thirteen-year-old daughter was living with family friends--the Joseph Thatcher Clarkes--in Harrow, and was going to an English school with their children. She had been passing through such miseries as a homesick child often suffers, and had written letters which evoked the following response. _To his Daughter._ VILLA LUISE, BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 26, 1900_. DARLING PEG,--Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your mother's behests made after the time when you scared us so by your inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the _best_ thing; and the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits, there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing is to pour out the _contents_ of one's bad spirits on others and leave them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so unexplained by anything you told us in the way of facts, that we didn't know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the _worst_ sort of thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this time--namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do write, still write rather mysteriously about your sorrows, not being quite open enough. Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. [_From margin._] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't _want_ to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it--that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of _yourself_ all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of _things_ and of _other people_--no matter what's the matter with our self. I have no doubt you are doing as well as you know how, darling little Peg; but we have to learn everything, and I also have no doubt that you'll manage it better and better if you ever have any more of it, and soon it will fade away, simply leaving you with more experience. The great thing for you _now_, I should suppose, would be to enter as friendlily as possible into the interest of the Clarke children. If you like them, or acted as if you liked them, you needn't trouble about the question of whether they like you or not. They probably will, fast enough; and if they don't, it will be their funeral, not yours. But this is a great lecture, so I will stop. The great thing about it is that it is all true. The baths are threatening to disagree with me again, so I may stop them soon. Will let you know as quick as anything is decided. Good news from home: the Merrimans have taken the Irving Street house for another year, and the Wambaughs (of the Law School) have taken Chocorua, though at a reduced rent. The weather here is almost continuously cold and sunless. Your mother is sleeping, and will doubtless add a word to this when she wakes. Keep a merry heart--"time and the hour run through the roughest day"--and believe me ever your most loving W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ [Post-card] ALTDORF, LAKE LUZERN, _July 20, [1900]_. Your last letter was, if anything, a more unmitigated blessing than its predecessors; and I, with my curious inertia to overcome, sit _thinking of letters_, and of the soul-music with which they might be filled if my tongue could only utter the thoughts that arise in me to youward, the beauty of the world, the conflict of life and death and youth and age and man and woman and righteousness and evil, etc., and Europe and America! but it stays all caked within and gets no articulation, the power of speech being so non-natural a function of our race. We are staying above Luzern, near a big spruce wood, at "Gutsch," and today being hot and passivity advisable, we came down and took the boat, for a whole day on the Lake. The works both of Nature and of Man in this region seem too perfect to be credible almost, and were I not a bitter Yankee, I would, without a moment's hesitation, be a Swiss, and probably then glad of the change. The _goodliness_ of this land is one of the things I ache to utter to you, but can't. Some day I will write, also to Jim P. My condition baffles me. I have lately felt better, but been bad again, and altogether can _do_ nothing without repentance afterwards. We have just lunched in this bowery back verandah, water trickling, beautiful old convent sleeping up the hillside. Love to you all! W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 16, 1900_. DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Here I am having a little private picnic all by myself, on this effulgent Sunday morning--real American September weather, by way of a miracle. I ordered my bath-chair man to wheel me out to the "Hochwald," where, he having been dismissed for three hours, until two o'clock, I am lying in the said luxurious throne, writing this on my knee, with nothing between but a number of Kuno Fischer's "Hegel's Leben, Werke und Lehre," now in process of publication, and the flexibility of which accounts for the poor handwriting. I am alone, save for the inevitable restaurant which hovers on the near horizon, in a beautiful grove of old oak trees averaging some 16 or 18 feet apart, through whose leaves the sunshine filters and dapples the clear ground or grass that lies between them. Alice is still in England, having finally at my command had to give up her long-cherished plan of a run home to see her mother, the children, you, and all the other _dulcissima mundi nomina_ that make of life a thing worth living for. I _funked_ the idea of being alone so long when I came to the point. It is not that I am worse, but there will be cold weather in the next couple of months; and, unable to sit out of doors then, as here and now, I shall probably either have to over-walk or over-read, and both things will be bad for me. [Illustration] [Illustration: "Damn the Absolute!" Chocorua, September, 1903. One morning James and Royce strolled into the road and sat down on a wall in earnest discussion. When James heard the camera click, as his daughter took the upper snap-shot, he cried, "Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say _Damn the Absolute_!"] As things are _now_, I get on well enough, for the bath business (especially the "bath-chair") carries one through a good deal of the day. The great Schott has positively forbidden me to go to England as I did last year; so, early in October, our faces will be turned towards Italy, and by Nov. 1 we shall, I hope, be ensconced in a _pension_ close to the Pincian Garden in Rome, to see how long _that_ resource will last. I confess I am in the mood of it, and that there is a suggestion of more richness about the name of Rome than about that of Rye, which, until Schott's veto, was the plan. How the Gifford lectures will fare, remains to be seen. I have felt strong movings towards home this fall, but reflection says: "Stay another winter," and I confess that now that October is approaching, it feels like the home-stretch and as if the time were getting short and the limbs of "next summer" in America burning through the veil which seems to hide them in the shape of the second European winter months. Who knows? perhaps I may be spry and active by that time! I have still one untried card up my sleeve, that may work wonders. All I can say of this third course of baths is that so far it seems to be doing me no harm. That it will do me any substantial good, after the previous experiences, seems decidedly doubtful. But one must suffer some inconvenience to please the doctors! Just as in most women there is a wife that craves to suffer and submit and be bullied, so in most men there is a _patient_ that needs to have a doctor and obey his orders, whether they be believed in or not.... Don't take the Malwida book[32] too seriously. I sent it _faute de mieux_. I don't think I ever told you how much I enjoyed hearing the Lesley volume[33] read aloud by Alice. We were just in the exactly right condition for enjoying that breath of old New England. Good-bye, dearest Fanny. Give my love to your mother, Mary, J. J. P., and all your circle. _Leb' wohl_ yourself, and believe me, your ever affectionate, W. J. _To Josiah Royce._ NAUHEIM, _Sept. 26, 1900_. BELOVED ROYCE,--Great was my, was _our_ pleasure in receiving your long and delightful letter last night. Like the lioness in Æsop's fable, you give birth to one young one only in the year, but that one is a lion. I give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape of post-cards; but despite such diversities of epistolary expression, the heart of each of us is in the right place. I need not say, my dear old boy, how touched I am at your expressions of affection, or how it pleases me to hear that you have missed me. I too miss you profoundly. I do not find in the hotel waiters, chambermaids and bath-attendants with whom my lot is chiefly cast, that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness, by accustoming me to which during all these years you have spoilt me for inferior kinds of intercourse. You are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental magnet. When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you. When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in one last death-grapple of an embrace. How then, O my dear Royce, can I forget you, or be contented out of your close neighborhood? Different as our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the _Object_ which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him generally"--and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell apart forever, though our formulas may. Home and Irving Street look very near when seen through these few winter months, and tho' it is still doubtful what I may be able to do in College, for social purposes I shall be available for probably numerous years to come. I haven't got at work yet--only four lectures of the first course written (strange to say)--but I am decidedly better today than I have been for the past ten months, and the matter is all ready in my mind; so that when, a month hence, I get settled down in Rome, I think the rest will go off fairly quickly. The second course I shall have to resign from, and write it out at home as a book. It must seem strange to you that the way from the mind to the pen should be as intraversable as it has been in this case of mine--you in whom it always seems so easily pervious. But Miller will be able to tell you all about my condition, both mental and physical, so I will waste no more words on that to me decidedly musty subject. I fully understand your great aversion to letters and other off-writing. You have done a perfectly Herculean amount of the most difficult productive work, and I believe you to be much more tired than you probably yourself suppose or know. Both mentally and physically, I imagine that a long vacation, in other scenes, with no sense of duty, would do you a world of good. I don't say the full fifteen months--for I imagine that one summer and one academic half-year would perhaps do the business better--you could preserve the relaxed and desultory condition as long as that probably, whilst later you'd begin to chafe, and _then_ you'd better be back in your own library. If _my_ continuing abroad is hindering this, my sorrow will be extreme. Of course I must some time come to a definite decision about my own relations to the College, but I am reserving that till the end of 1900, when I shall write to Eliot in full. There is still a therapeutic card to play, of which I will say nothing just now, and I don't want to commit myself before that has been tried. You say nothing of the second course of Aberdeen lectures, nor do you speak at all of the Dublin course. Strange omissions, like your not sending me your Ingersoll lecture! I assume that the publication of [your] Gifford Volume II will not be very long delayed. I am eager to read them. I can read philosophy now, and have just read the first three _Lieferungen_ of K. Fischer's "Hegel." I must say I prefer the original text. Fischer's paraphrases always flatten and dry things out; and he gives no rich sauce of his own to compensate. I have been sorry to hear from Palmer that he also has been very tired. One can't keep going forever! P. has been like an archangel in his letters to me, and I am inexpressibly grateful. Well! everybody has been kinder than I deserve.... _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ ROME, _Dec. 25, 1900_. ...Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty suggestiveness known to this child. Other places have single features better than anything in Rome, perhaps, but for an _ensemble_ Rome seems to beat the world. Just a FEAST for the eye from the moment you leave your hotel door to the moment you return. Those who say that beauty is all made up of suggestion are well disproved here. For the things the eyes most gloat on, the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no suggestions save of moral horror, and their "tactile values," as Berenson would say, are pure gooseflesh. Nevertheless the sight of them delights. And then there is such a geologic stratification of history! I dote on the fine equestrian statue of Garibaldi, on the Janiculum, quietly bending his head with a look half-meditative, half-strategical, but wholly victorious, upon Saint Peter's and the Vatican. What luck for a man and a party to have opposed to it an enemy that stood up for _nothing_ that was ideal, for _everything_ that was mean in life. Austria, Naples, and the Mother of harlots here, were enough to deify anyone who defied them. What glorious things are some of these Italian inscriptions--for example on Giordano Bruno's statue:-- A BRUNO _il secolo da lui divinato qui dove il rogo arse_. --"here, where the faggots burned." It makes the tears come, for the poetic justice; though I imagine B. to have been a very pesky sort of a crank, worthy of little sympathy had not the "rogo" done its work on him. Of the awful corruptions and cruelties which this place suggests there is no end. Our neighbors in rooms and _commensaux_ at meals are the J. G. Frazers--he of the "Golden Bough," "Pausanias," and other three-and six-volume works of anthropological erudition, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a sucking babe of humility, unworldliness and molelike sightlessness to everything except _print_.... He, after Tylor, is the greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knows nothing of psychical research and thinks that the trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like, are all _feigned_! Verily science is amusing! But he is conscience incarnate, and I have been stirring him up so that I imagine he will now proceed to put in big loads of work in the morbid psychological direction. Dear Fanny ... I can write no more this morning. I hope your Christmas is "merry," and that the new year will be "happy" for you all. Pray take our warmest love, give it to your mother and Mary, and some of it to the brothers. I will write better soon. Your ever grateful and affectionate W. J. Don't let up on your own writing, so say we both! Your letters are pure blessings. _To James Sully._ ROME, _Mar. 3, 1901_. DEAR SULLY,--Your letter of Feb. 8th arrived duly and gave me much pleasure _qua_ epistolary manifestation of sympathy, but less _qua_ revelation of depression on your own part. I have been so floundering up and down, now above and now below the line of bad nervous prostration, that I have written no letters for three weeks past, hoping thereby the better to accomplish certain other writing; but the other writing had to be stopped so letters and post-cards may begin. I see you take the war still very much to heart, and I myself think that the blundering way in which the Colonial Office drove the Dutchmen into it, with no conception whatever of the psychological situation, is only outdone by our still more anti-psychological blundering in the Philippines. Both countries have lost their moral prestige--we far more completely than you, because for our conduct there is literally _no_ excuse to be made except _absolute_ stupidity, whilst you can make out a very fair case, as such cases go. But we can, and undoubtedly shall, draw back, whereas that for an Empire like yours seems politically impossible. Empire anyhow is half crime by necessity of Nature, and to see a country like the United States, lucky enough to be born outside of it and its fatal traditions and inheritances, perversely rushing to wallow in the mire of it, shows how strong these ancient race instincts be. And that is my consolation! We are no worse than the best of men have ever been. We are simply not superhuman; and the loud reaction against the brutal business, in both countries, shows how the _theory_ of the matter has really advanced during the last century. Yes! H. Sidgwick is a sad loss, with all his remaining philosophic wisdom unwritten. I feel greatly F. W. H. Myers's loss also. He suffered terribly with suffocation, but bore it stunningly well. He died in this very hotel, where he had been not more than a fortnight. I don't know _how_ tolerant (or intolerant) you are towards his pursuits and speculations. I regard them as fragmentary and conjectural--of course; but as most laborious and praiseworthy; and knowing how much psychologists as a rule have counted him out from their profession, I have thought it my duty to write a little tribute to his service to psychology to be read on March 8th, at a memorial meeting of the S. P. R. in his honor. It will appear, whether read or not, in the Proceedings, and I hope may not appear to you exaggerated. I seriously believe that the general problem of the subliminal, as Myers propounds it, promises to be one of the _great_ problems, possibly even the greatest problem, of psychology.... We leave Rome in three days, booked for Rye the first of April. I _must_ get into the _country!_ If I do more than just pass through London, I will arrange for a meeting. My Edinburgh lectures begin early in May--after that I shall have freedom. Ever truly yours, Wm. James. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ [Post-card] FLORENCE, _March 18, 1901_. Thus far towards home, thank Heaven! after a week at Perugia and Assisi. Glorious air, memorable scenes. Made acquaintance of Sabatier, author of St. Francis's life--very jolly. Best of all, made acquaintance with Francis's retreat in the mountain. _Navrant!_--it makes one see medieval Christianity face to face. The lair of the individual wild animal, and that animal the saint! I hope you saw it. Thanks for your last letter to Alice. Lots of love. W. J. _To F. C. S. Schiller._ RYE, _April 13, 1901_. DEAR SCHILLER,--You are showering benedictions on me. I return the bulky ones, keeping the lighter weights. I think the parody on Bradley amazingly good--if I had his book here I would probably revive my memory of his discouraged style and scribble a marginal contribution of my own. He is, really, an extra humble-minded man, I think, but even more humble-minded about his reader than about himself, which gives him that false air of arrogance. How you concocted those epigrams, _à la_ preface of B., I don't see. In general I don't see how an epigram, being a pure bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ. On the Limericks, as you call them, I set less store, much less. If everybody is to come in for a share of allusion, I am willing, but I don't want my name to figure in the ghostly ballet with but few companions. Royce wrote a _very_ funny thing in pedantic German some years ago, purporting to be the proof by a distant-future professor that I was an habitual drunkard, based on passages culled from my writings. He may have it yet. If I ever get any animal spirits again, I may get warmed up, by your example, into making jokes, and may then contribute. But I beg you let this thing mull till you get a _lot_ of matter--and then _sift_. It's the only way. But Oxford seems a better climate for epigram than is the rest of the world. I shall stay here--I find myself much more comfortable thoracically already than when I came--until my Edinburgh lectures begin on May 16th, though I shall have to run up to London towards the end of the month to get some clothes made, and to meet my son who arrives from home. I much regret that it will be quite impossible for me to go either to Oxford or Cambridge--though, if things took an unexpectedly good turn, I might indeed do so after June 18th, when my lecture course ends. Do you meanwhile keep hearty and "funny"! I stopped at Gersau half a day and found it a sweet little place. Fondly yours, W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ ROXBURGHE HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _May 15, 1901_. DEAREST FANNY,--You see where we are! I give _you_ the first news of life's journey being so far advanced! It is a deadly enterprise, I'm afraid, with the social entanglements that lie ahead, and I feel a cake of ice in my epigastrium at the prospect, but _le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and from the other point of view, that it is real life beginning once more, it is perfectly glorious, and I feel as if yesterday in leaving London I had said good-bye to a rather dreadful and death-bound segment of life. As regards the sociability, it is fortunately a time of year in which only the medical part of the University is present. The professors of the other faculties are already in large part scattered, I think,--at least the two Seths (who are the only ones I directly know) are away, and I have written to the Secretary of the Academic Senate, Sir Ludovic Grant of the Law Faculty, that I am unable to "dine out" or attend afternoon receptions, so we may be pretty well left alone. I always hated lecturing except as regular instruction to students, of whom there will probably be none now in the audience. But to compensate, there begins next week a big convocation here of all ministers in Scotland, and there will doubtless be a number of them present, which, considering the matter to be offered, is probably better. We had a splendid journey yesterday in an American (almost!) train, first-class, and had the pleasure of some talk with our Cambridge neighbor, Mrs. Ole Bull, on her way to Norway to the unveiling of a monument to her husband. She was accompanied by an extraordinarily fine character and mind--odd way of expressing myself!--a young Englishwoman named Noble, who has Hinduized herself (converted by Vivekananda to his philosophy) and lives now for the Hindu people. These free individuals who live their own life, no matter what domestic prejudices have to be snapped, are on the whole a refreshing sight to me, who can do nothing of the kind myself. And Miss Noble[34] is a most deliberate and balanced person--no frothy enthusiast in point of character, though I believe her philosophy to be more or less false. Perhaps no more so than anyone else's! We are in one of those deadly respectable hotels where you have to ring the front-door-bell. Give me a cheerful, blackguardly place like the Charing Cross, where we were in London. The London tailor and shirtmaker, it being in the height of the Season, didn't fulfill their promises; and as I sloughed my ancient cocoon at Rye, trusting to pick up my iridescent wings the day before yesterday in passing through the metropolis, I am here with but two _chemises_ at present (one of them now in the wash) and fear that tomorrow, in spite of tailors' promises to send, I may have to lecture in my pyjamas--that would give a cachet of American originality. The weather is fine--we have just finished breakfast. Our son Harry ... and his mother will soon sally out to explore the town, whilst I lie low till about noon, when I shall report my presence and receive instructions from my boss, Grant, and prepare to meet the storm. It is astonishing how pusillanimous two years of invalidism can make one. Alice and Harry both send love, and so do I in heaps and steamer-loads, dear Fanny, begging your mother to take of it as much as she requires for her share. I will write again--doubtless--tomorrow. _May 17._ It proved quite impossible to write to you yesterday, so I do it the first thing this morning. I have made my plunge and the foregoing chill has given place to the warm "reaction." The audience was more numerous than had been expected, some 250, and exceedingly sympathetic, laughing at everything, even whenever I used a polysyllabic word. I send you the "Scotsman," with a skeleton report which might have been much worse made. I am all right this morning again, so have no doubts of putting the job through, if only I don't have too much sociability. I have got a week free of invitations so far, and all things considered, fancy that we shan't be persecuted. Edinburgh is surely the noblest city ever built by man. The weather has been splendid so far, and cold and bracing as the top of Mount Washington in early April. Everyone here speaks of it however as "hot." One needs fires at night and an overcoat out of the sun. The full-bodied air, half misty and half smoky, holds the sunshine in that way which one sees only in these islands, making the shadowy side of everything quite black, so that all perspectives and vistas appear with objects cut blackly against each other according to their nearness, and plane rising behind plane of flat dark relieved against flat light in ever-receding gradation. It is magnificent. But I mustn't become a Ruskin!--the purpose of this letter being merely to acquaint you with our well-being and success so far. We have found bully lodgings, spacious to one's heart's content, upon a cheerful square, and actually with a book-shelf fully two feet wide and two stories high, upon the wall, the first we have seen for two years! (There were of course book-cases enough at Lamb House, but all tight packed already.) We now go out to take the air. I feel as if a decidedly bad interlude in the journey of my life were closed, and the real honest thing gradually beginning again. Love to you all! Your ever affectionate W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ EDINBURGH, _May 30, 1901_. DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Beautiful as the spring is here, the words you so often let drop about American weather make me homesick for that article. It is blasphemous, however, to pine for anything when one is in Edinburgh in May, and takes an open drive every afternoon in the surrounding country by way of a constitutional. The green is of the vividest, splendid trees and acres, and the air itself an _object_, holding watery vapor, tenuous smoke, and ancient sunshine in solution, so as to yield the most exquisite minglings and gradations of silvery brown and blue and pearly gray. As for the city, its vistas are magnificent. We are _comblés_ with civilities, which Harry and Alice are to a certain extent enjoying, though I have to hang back and spend much of the time between my lectures in bed, to rest off the aortic distress which that operation gives. I call it aortic because it feels like that, but I can get no information from the Drs., so I won't swear I'm right. My heart, under the influence of that magical juice, tincture of digitalis,--only 6 drops daily,--is performing _beautifully_ and gives no trouble at all. The audiences grow instead of dwindling, and in spite of rain, being about 300 and just crowding the room. They sit as still as death and then applaud magnificently, so I am sure the lectures are a success. Previous Gifford lectures have had audiences beginning with 60 and dwindling to 15. In an hour and a half (I write this in bed) I shall be beginning the fifth lecture, which will, when finished, put me half way through the arduous job. I know you will relish these details, which please pass on to Jim P. I would send you the reports in the "Scotsman," but they distort so much by their sham continuity with vast omission (the reporters get my MS.), that the result is caricature. Edinburgh is _spiritually_ much like Boston, only stronger and with more temperament in the people. But we're all growing into much of a sameness everywhere. I have dined out once--an almost fatal experiment! I was introduced to Lord Somebody: "How often do you lecture?"--"Twice a week."--"What do you do between?--play golf?" Another invitation: "Come at 6--the dinner at 7.30--and we can walk or play bowls till dinner so as not to fatigue you"--I having pleaded my delicacy of constitution. I rejoice in the prospect of Booker W.'s[35] book, and thank your mother heartily. My mouth had been watering for just that volume. Autobiographies take the cake. I mean to read nothing else. Strange to say, I am now for the first time reading Marie Bashkirtseff. It takes hold of me tremenjus. I feel as if I had lived inside of her, and in spite of her hatefulness, esteem and even like her for her incorruptible way of telling the truth. I have not seen Huxley's life yet. It must be delightful, only I can't agree to what seems to be becoming the conventionally accepted view of him, that he possessed the exclusive specialty of living for the truth. A good deal of humbug about that!--at least when it becomes a professional and heroic attitude. Your base remark about Aguinaldo is clean forgotten, if ever heard. I know you wouldn't harm the poor man, who, unless Malay human nature is weaker than human nature elsewhere, has pretty surely some surprises up his sleeve for us yet. Best love to you all. Your affectionate Wm. James. _To Henry W. Rankin._ EDINBURGH, _June 16, 1901_. DEAR MR. RANKIN,--I have received all your letters and missives, inclusive of the letter which you think I must have lost, some months back. I professor-ed you because I had read your name printed with that title in a newspaper letter from East Northfield, and supposed that, by courtesy at any rate, that title was conferred on you by a public opinion to which I liked to conform. I have given nine of my lectures and am to give the tenth tomorrow. They have been a success, to judge by the numbers of the audience (300-odd) and their non-diminution towards the end. No previous "Giffords" have drawn near so many. It will please you to know that I am stronger and tougher than when I began, too; so a great load is off my mind. You have been so extraordinarily brotherly to me in writing of your convictions and in furnishing me ideas, that I feel ashamed of my churlish and chary replies. You, however, have forgiven me. Now, at the end of this first course, I feel my "matter" taking firmer shape, and it will please you less to hear me say that I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought. The reasons you from time to time have given me, never better expressed than in your letter before the last, have somehow failed to convince. In these lectures the ground I am taking is this: The mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed; and the experiences make such flexible combinations with the intellectual prepossessions of their subjects, that one may almost say that they have no proper _intellectual_ deliverance of their own, but belong to a region deeper, and more vital and practical, than that which the intellect inhabits. For this they are also indestructible by intellectual arguments and criticisms. I attach the mystical or religious consciousness to the possession of an extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption. We are thus made convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the latter is nevertheless continuous. The impressions and impulsions and emotions and excitements which we thence receive help us to live, they found invincible assurance of a world beyond the sense, they melt our hearts and communicate significance and value to everything and make us happy. They do this for the individual who has them, and other individuals follow him. Religion in this way is absolutely indestructible. Philosophy and theology give their conceptual interpretations of this experiential life. The farther margin of the subliminal field being unknown, it can be treated as by Transcendental Idealism, as an Absolute mind with a part of which we coalesce, or by Christian theology, as a distinct deity acting on us. Something, not our immediate self, does act on our life! So I seem doubtless to my audience to be blowing hot and cold, explaining away Christianity, yet defending the more general basis from which I say it proceeds. I fear that these brief words may be misleading, but let them go! When the book comes out, you will get a truer idea. Believe me, with profound regards, your always truly, Wm. James. _To Charles Eliot Norton._ RYE, _June 26, 1901_. DEAR CHARLES NORTON,--Your delightful letter of June 1st has added one more item to my debt of gratitude to you; and now that the Edinburgh strain is over, I can sit down and make you a reply a little more adequate than heretofore has been possible. The lectures went off most successfully, and though I got tired enough, I feel that I am essentially tougher and stronger for the old familiar functional activity. My _tone_ is changed immensely, and that is the main point. To be actually earning one's salt again, after so many months of listless waiting and wondering whether such a thing will ever again become possible, puts a new heart into one, and I now look towards the future with aggressive and hopeful eyes again, though perhaps not with quite the cannibalistic ones of the youth of the new century. Edinburgh is great. A strong broad city, and, in its spiritual essence, almost exactly feeling to me like old Boston, _nuclear_ Boston, though on a larger, more important scale. People were very friendly, but we had to dodge invitations--_hoffentlich_ I may be able to accept more of them next year. The audience was extraordinarily attentive and reactive--I never had an audience so keen to catch every point. I flatter myself that by blowing alternately hot and cold on their Christian prejudices I succeeded in baffling them completely till the final quarter-hour, when I satisfied their curiosity by showing more plainly my hand. Then, I think, I permanently dissatisfied both extremes, and pleased a mean numerically quite small. _Qui vivra verra_. London seemed curiously profane and free-and-easy, not exactly _shabby_, but go-as-you-please, in aspect, as we came down five days ago. Since then I spent a day with poor Mrs. Myers.... I mailed you yesterday a notice I wrote in Rome of him.[36] He "looms" upon me after death more than he did in life, and I think that his forthcoming book about "Human Personality" will probably rank hereafter as "epoch-making." At London I saw Theodora [Sedgwick] and the W. Darwins. Theodora was as good and genial as ever, and Sara [Darwin] looked, I thought, wonderfully "distinguished" and wonderfully little changed considering the length of intervening years and the advance of the Enemy. I was too tired to look up Leslie Stephen, or anyone else save Mrs. John Bancroft when in London, although I wanted much to see L. S. The first volume of his "Utilitarians" seems to me a wonderfully spirited performance--I haven't yet got at the other two. I am hoping to get off to Nauheim tomorrow, leaving Alice and Harry to follow a little later. I confess that the Continent "draws" me again. I don't know whether it be the essential identity of soul that expresses itself in English things, and makes them seem known by heart already and intellectually dead and unexciting, or whether it is the singular lack of visible _sentiment_ in England, and absence of "charm," or the oppressive ponderosity and superfluity and prominence of the unnecessary, or what it is, but I'm blest if I ever wish to be in England again. Any continental country whatever stimulates and refreshes vastly more, in spite of so much strong picturesqueness here, and so beautiful a Nature. England is ungracious, unamiable and heavy; whilst the Continent is everywhere light and amiably quaint, even where it is ugly, as in many elements it is in Germany. To tell the truth, I long to steep myself in America again and let the broken rootlets make new adhesions to the native soil. A man coquetting with too many countries is as bad as a bigamist, and loses his soul altogether. I suppose you are at Ashfield and I hope surrounded, or soon to be so, by more children than of late, and all well and happy. Don't feel too bad about the country. We've thrown away our old privileged and prerogative position among the nations, but it only showed we were less sincere about it than we supposed we were. The eternal fight of liberalism has now to be fought by us on much the same terms as in the older countries. We have still the better chance in our freedom from all the corrupting influences from on top from which they suffer.--Good-bye and love from both of us, to you all. Yours ever faithfully, Wm. James. _To Nathaniel S. Shaler._ [1901?] DEAR SHALER,--Being a man of methodical sequence in my reading, which in these days is anyhow rather slower than it used to be, I have only just got at your book.[37] Once begun, it slipped along "like a novel," and I must confess to you that it leaves a good taste behind; in fact a sort of _haunting_ flavor due to its individuality, which I find it hard to explain or define. To begin with, it doesn't seem exactly like you, but rather like some quiet and conscientious old passive contemplator of life, not bristling as you are with "points," and vivacity. Its light is dampened and suffused--and all the better perhaps for that. Then it is essentially a confession of faith and a religious attitude--which one doesn't get so much from you upon the street, although even there 'tis clear that you have that within which passeth show. The optimism and healthy-mindedness are yours through and through, so is the wide imagination. But the moderate and non-emphatic way of putting things is not; nor is the absence of any "American humor." So I don't know just when or where or how you wrote it. I can't place it in the Museum or University Hall. Probably it was in Quincy Street, and in a sort of Piperio-Armadan trance! Anyhow it is a sincere book, and tremendously impressive by the gravity and dignity and peacefulness with which it suggests rather than proclaims conclusions on these eternal themes. No more than you can I believe that death is due to selection; yet I wish you had framed some hypothesis as to the physico-chemical necessity thereof, or discussed such hypotheses as have been made. I think you deduce a little too easily from the facts the existence of a general guiding tendency toward ends like those which our mind sets. We never know what ends may have been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn't do so by chance doesn't apply. It would apply if the witness had preëxisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once; the witness is there after the fact and simply approves, dependently. As I understand improbability, it only exists where independents coincide. Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of "probability" at all. I think, therefore, that the excellences we have reached and now approve may be due to no general design but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from point to point. We are all you say we are, as heirs; we are a mystery of condensation, and yet of extrication and individuation, and we must worship the soil we have so wonderfully sprung from. Yet I don't think we are necessitated to worship it as the Theists do, in the shape of one all-inclusive and all-operative designing power, but rather like polytheists, in the shape of a collection of beings who have each contributed and are now contributing to the realization of ideals more or less like those for which we live ourselves. This more pluralistic style of feeling seems to me both to allow of a warmer sort of loyalty to our past helpers, and to tally more exactly with the mixed condition in which we find the world as to its ideals. What if we did come where we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is gained, is gained, all the same. As to what may have been lost, who knows of it, in any case? or whether it might not have been much better than what came? But if it might, that need not prevent _us_ from building on what _we_ have. There are lots of impressive passages in the book, which certainly will live and be an influence of a high order. Chapters 8, 10, 14, 15 have struck me most particularly. I gave at Edinburgh two lectures on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," contrasting it with that of "the sick soul." I shall soon have to quote your book as a healthy-minded document of the first importance, though I believe myself that the sick soul must have its say, and probably carries authority too.... Ever yours, Wm. James. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ NAUHEIM, _July 10, 1901_. DEAREST FANNY,--Your letter of June 28th comes just as I was working myself up to a last European farewell to you, anyhow, the which has far more instigative spur now, with your magnificent effusion in my hands. Dear Fanny, whatever you do, don't _die_ before our return! In these two short years so many of my best friends have been mown down, that I feel uncertainty everywhere, and gasp till the interval is over. John Ropes, Henry Sidgwick, F. Myers, T. Davidson, Carroll Everett, Edward Hooper, John Fiske, all intimate and valuable, some of them extremely so, and the circle grows ever smaller and will grow so to the end of one's own life. Now comes Whitman, whom I never knew very well, but whom I always liked thoroughly, and wish I had known better.... It will be interesting to know what new turn it will give to S. W.'s existence. I haven't the least idea how it will affect her outward life. Doubtless she will be freer to come abroad; but I hope and trust she will not be taking to staying any time in London or Paris, in the brutal cynical atmosphere of which places her little eagerness and efflorescences and cordialities would receive no such sympathetic treatment as they do with us, until she had stayed long enough for people to know her thoroughly and conquered a position by living down the first impression. Nothing so _anti-English_ as S. W.'s whole "sphere." So keep her at home--with occasional sallies abroad; and if she must ever winter abroad, let it be in delightful slipshod old Rome! All which, as you perceive, is somewhat confidential. I trust that the present failure of health with her is something altogether transient, and that she will keep swimming long after everyone else has put into shore. Which simile reminds me of Mrs. Holmes's panel, with its superb inscription.[38] What a sense she has for such things! and how I thank you for quoting it! With your and her permission, I shall make a vital use of it in a future book. It sums up the attitude towards life of a good philosophic pluralist, and that is what, in my capacity of author of that book, I am to be. I thank you also for the reference to I Corinthians, 1, 28, etc.[39] I had never expressly noticed that text; but it will make the splendidest motto for Myers's two posthumous volumes, and I am going to write to Mrs. Myers to suggest the same. I thank you also for your sympathetic remarks about my paper on Myers. Fifty or a hundred years hence, people will know better than now whether his instinct for truth was a sound one; and perhaps will then pat me on the back for backing him. At present they give us the cold shoulder. We are righter, in any event, than the Münsterbergs and Jastrows are, because we don't undertake, as a condition of our investigating phenomena, to bargain with them that they shan't upset our "presuppositions." It is a beautiful summer morning, and I write under an awning on the high-perched corner balcony of the bedroom in which we live, of a corner house on the edge of the little town, with houses on the west of us and the fertile country spreading towards the east and south. A lovely region, though a climate terribly _flat_. I expect to take my last bath today, and to get my absolution from the terrible Schott; whereupon we shall leave tomorrow morning for Strassburg and the Vosges, for a week of touring up in higher air, and thence, _über_ Paris, as straight as may be for Rye. I keep in a state of subliminal excitement over our sailing on the 31st. It seems too good to be really possible. Yet the ratchet of time will work along its daily cogs, and doubtless bring it safe within our grasp. Last year I felt no distinctly beneficial effect from the baths. This year it is distinct. I have, in other words, continued pretty steadily getting better for four months past; so it is evident that I am in a genuinely ameliorative phase of my existence, of which the acquired momentum may carry me beyond any living man of my age. At any rate, I set no limits now! When we return I shall go straight up to Chocorua to the Salters'. What I _crave_ most is some wild American country. It is a curious organic-feeling need. One's social relations with European landscape are entirely different, everything being so fenced or planted that you can't lie down and sprawl. Kipling, alluding to the "bleeding raw" appearance of some of our outskirt settlements, says, "Americans don't mix much with their landscape as yet." But we mix a darned sight more than Europeans, so far as our individual organisms go, with our camping and general wild-animal personal relations. Thank Heaven that our Nature is so much less "redeemed"!... You see, Fanny, that we are in good spirits on the whole, although my poor dear Alice has long sick-headaches that consume a good many days--she is just emerging from a bad one. Happiness, I have lately discovered, is no positive feeling, but a negative condition of freedom from a number of restrictive sensations of which our organism usually seems to be the seat. When they are wiped out, the clearness and cleanness of the contrast is happiness. This is why anesthetics make us so happy. But don't you take to drink on that account! Love to your mother, Mary, and all. Write to us no more. How happy _that_ responsibility gone must make you! We both send warmest love, W. J. _To Henry James._ [Post-card] BAD-NAUHEIM, _July 11, [1901]_. Your letter and paper, with the shock of John Fiske's death, came yesterday. It is too bad, for he had lots of good work in him yet, and is a loss to American letters as well as to his family. Singularly simple, solid, honest creature, he will be hugely missed by many! Everybody seems to be going! _We_ stay. Life here is absolutely monotonous, but very sweet. The country is so innocently pretty. I sit up here on a terrace-restaurant, looking down on park and town, with the leaves playing in the warm breeze above me, and the little Gothic town of Friedberg only a mile off, in the midst of the great fertile plain all chequer-boarded with the different tinted crops and framed in a far-off horizon of low hills and woods. Alice and Harry, kept in by the heat, come later. He went for a distant walk yesterday P.M. and, not returning till near eleven, we thought he might have got lost in the woods. Yale beat the University race, _but_ Bill's four[-oared crew] beat the Yale four. On such things is human contentment based. The baths stir up my aortic feeling and make me depressed, but I've had 6 of them, and the rest will pass quickly. Love. W. J. _To E. L. Godkin._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _July 25, 1901_. DEAR GODKIN,--Yours of the 9th, which came duly, gave me great pleasure, first because it showed that your love for me had not grown cold, and, second, because it seemed to reveal in you tendencies towards sociability at large which are incompatible with a very alarming condition of health. Nothing can give us greater pleasure than to come and see you before we sail. We shall stick here, probably, for a fortnight longer, then go for a week to the Hartz mountains to brace up a little--the baths being very debilitating and the air of Nauheim sedative. Then straight to Rye until we sail--on August 31st. I hope that you enjoy the "New Forest"--the "Children" thereof, by Capt. Mayne Reid, I think, was one of my most mysteriously impressive books about the age of ten. But I fear that there is not much primeval forest to be seen there nowadays. Nauheim is a sweet little place. One never sees a soldier and wouldn't know that _Militarismus_ existed. There are two policemen, one of them an old fellow of 70 who shuffles along to keep his weak knees from giving way. I went on business to the police office t' other day. The building stood in a fine cabbage garden, and over the first door one met on entering stood the word _Küche_[40] in large letters. Quite like the old idyllic pre-Sadowan German days. My heart is getting _well_! I made an excursion to Homburg yesterday, with J. B. Warner of Cambridge, counsellor at law, and general disputant. For about six hours we discussed the Philippine question, he damning the anti-Imperialists--yet my thoracic contents remained as solid as if cast in Portland cement. Six months ago I should have had the wildest commotion there. Congratulate me! Kindest regards to you both, in which my wife joins. Yours ever affectionately, Wm. James. It should perhaps be explained that E. L. Godkin had had a cerebral hemorrhage the year before. It had left him clear in mind, but a permanent invalid, with little power of locomotion. James spent several days with him at Castle Malwood near Stony Cross before he sailed for home; and when he was in England again the next year, he repeated the visit. [Illustration: William James and Henry James posing for a Kodak in 1900.] _To E. L. Godkin._ LAMB HOUSE, _Aug. 29, 1901_. MY DEAR GODKIN,--Just a line to bid you both farewell! We leave for London tomorrow morning and at four on Saturday we shall be ploughing the deep. All goes well, save that the wife has sprained her ankle, and with the "firmness" that characterizes her lovely sex insists on hobbling about and doing all the packing. I shan't be aisy till I see her in her berth. After all, in spite of you and Henry, and all Americo-phobes, I'm glad I'm going back to my own country again. Notwithstanding its "humble"ness, its fatigues, and its complications, there's no place like home--though I think the New Forest might come near it as a substitute. England in general is too padded and cushioned for my rustic taste. The most elevating _moral_ thing I've seen during these two years abroad, after Myers's heroic exit from this world at Rome last winter, has been the gentleness and cheerful spirit with which you are still able to remain in it after such a blow as you have received. Who could suppose so much public ferocity to cover so much private sweetness? Seriously speaking, it is more edifying to us others, dear Godkin, than you yourself can understand it to be, and I for one have learned by the example. I pray that your winter problems may gradually solve themselves without perplexity, and that next spring may find you relieved of all this helplessness. It is a very slow progress, with many steps backwards, but if the length of the forward steps preponderates, one may be well content. Good-bye and bless you both. Affectionately yours, Wm. James. James returned to America in early September, in advance of the beginning of the College term. But from this time on he limited his teaching to one half-course during the year. His intention was to husband his strength for writing. The course which he offered during the first half of the College year was accordingly announced as a course on "The Psychological Elements of Religious Life." By the end of the winter, the second series of Gifford lectures, constituting the last half of the "Varieties," had been written out. _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ SILVER LAKE, N. H., _Sept. 14, 1901_. DEAR PAULINE,--Your kind letter (excuse pencil--pen won't write) appears to have reached London after our departure and has just followed us hither. I had hoped for a word from you, first at Nauheim, then on the steamer, then at Cambridge; but this makes everything right. How good to think of you as the same old loveress of woods and skies and waters, and of your Bryn-Mawr friends. May none of the lot of you ever grow insufficient or forsake each other! The sight of you sporting in Nature's bosom once lifted me into a sympathetic region, and made a better boy of me in ways which it would probably amuse and surprise you to learn of, so strangely are characters useful to each other, and so subtly are destinies intermixed. But with you on the mountain-tops of existence still, and me apparently destined to remain grubbing in the cellar, we seem far enough apart at present and may have to remain so. Alas! how brief is life's glory, at the best. I can't get to Keene Valley this year, and [may] possibly never get there. Give a kindly thought, my friend, to the spectre who once for a few times trudged by your side, and who would do so again if he could. I'm a "motor," and morally ill-adapted to the game of patience. I have reached home in pretty poor case, but I think it's mainly "nerves" at present, and therefore remediable; so I live on the future, but keep my expectations modest. Two years away has been too long, and the "strangeness" which I dreaded (from past experience of it) covers all things American as with a veil. Pathetic and poverty-stricken is all I see! This will pass away, but I don't want good things to pass away also, so I beseech you, Pauline, to sit down and write me a good intimate letter telling me what your life and interest were in New York last winter. I am very sorry to hear of your sister Susan's illness, and pray that the summer will set her right. Did you see much of Miller this summer? I hate to think of his having grown so delicate! Did you see Perry again? He was at the Putnam Camp? How is Adler after his _Cur_?--or is he not yet back? What have you read? What have you cared for? Be indulgent to me, and write to me here--I stay for 10 days longer--the family--all well--remain in Cambridge. I find letters a great thing to keep one from slipping out of life. Love to you all! Your W. J. The next letter was written across the back of a circular invitation to join the American Philosophical Association, then being formed, of which Professor Gardiner was Secretary. _To H. N. Gardiner._ Cambridge, _Nov. 14, 1901_. DEAR GARDINER,--I am still pretty poorly and can't "jine" anything--but, apart from that, I don't foresee much good from a Philosophical Society. Philosophical discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have learned how to converse by months of weary trials and failure. The philosopher is a lone beast dwelling in his individual burrow.--Count me _out_!--I hope all goes well with you. I expect to get well, but it needs _patience_. Wm. James. On April 1, 1902, James sailed for England, to deliver the second "course" of his series of Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. _To F. C. S. Schiller._ HATLEY ST. GEORGE, TORQUAY, _Apr. 20, 1902_. MY DEAR SCHILLER,--I could shed tears that you should have been so near me and yet been missed. I got your big envelope on Thursday at the hotel, and your two other missives here this morning. Of the Axioms paper I have only read a sheet and a half at the beginning and the superb conclusion which has just arrived. I shall fairly _gloat_ upon the whole of it, and will write you my impressions and criticisms, if criticisms there be. It is an uplifting thought that truth is to be told at last in a radical and attention-compelling manner. I think I know, though, how the attention of many will find a way not to be compelled--their will is so set on having a technically and artificially and _professionally_ expressed system, that all talk carried on as yours is on principles of common-sense activity is as remote and little worthy of being listened to as the slanging each other of boys in the street as we pass. Men disdain to notice that. It is only after our (_i.e._ your and my) general way of thinking gets organized enough to become a regular part of the _bureaucracy_ of philosophy that we shall get a serious hearing. Then, I feel inwardly convinced, our day will have come. But then, you may well say, the brains will be out and the man will be dead. Anyhow, _vive_ the Anglo-Saxon amateur, disciple of Locke and Hume, and _pereat_ the German professional! We are here for a week with the Godkins--poor old G., once such a power, and now an utter wreck after a stroke of paralysis three years ago. Beautiful place, southeast gale, volleying rain and streaming panes and volumes of soft sea-laden wind. I hope you are not serious about an Oxford degree for your humble servant. If you are, pray drop the thought! I am out of the race for all such vanities. Write me a degree on parchment and send it yourself--in any case it would be but your award!--and it will be cheaper and more veracious. I _had_ to take the Edinburgh one, and accepted the Durham one to please my wife. Thank you, no coronation either! I am a poor New Hampshire rustic, in bad health, and long to get back, after four summers' absence, to my own cottage and children, and never come away again for lectures or degrees or anything else. It all depends on a man's age; and after sixty, if ever, one feels as if one ought to come to some sort of equilibrium with one's native environment, and by means of a regular life get one's small message to mankind on paper. That nowadays is my only aspiration. The Gifford lectures are all facts and no philosophy--I trust that you may receive the volume by the middle of June. When, oh, when is your volume to appear? The sheet you send me leaves off just at the point where Boyle-Gibson begins to me to be most interesting! Ever fondly yours, Wm. James. Your ancient President, Schurman, was also at Edinburgh getting LL.D'd. He is conducting a campaign in favor of Philippino independence with masterly tactics, which reconcile me completely to him, laying his finger on just the right and telling points. _To Charles Eliot Norton._ LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _May 4, 1902_. DEAR NORTON,--I hear with grief and concern that you have had a bad fall. In a letter received this morning you are described as better, so I hope it will have had no untoward consequences beyond the immediate shock. We need you long to abide with us in undiminished vigor and health. Our voyage was smooth, though cloudy, and we found Miss Ward a very honest and lovable girl. Henry D. Lloyd, whose name you know as that of a state-socialist writer, sat opposite to us, and proved one of the most "winning" men it was ever my fortune to know. We went to Stratford for the first time. The absolute extermination and obliteration of every record of Shakespeare save a few sordid material details, and the general suggestion of narrowness and niggardliness which ancient Stratford makes, taken in comparison with the way in which the spiritual quantity "Shakespeare" has mingled into the soul of the world, was most uncanny, and I feel ready to believe in almost any mythical story of the authorship. In fact a visit to Stratford now seems to me the strongest appeal a Baconian can make. The country round about was exquisite. Still more so the country round about Torquay, where we stayed with the Godkins for eight days--he holding his own, as it seemed to me, but hardly improving, she earning palms of glory by her strength and virtue. A regular little trump! They have taken for the next two months the most beautiful country place I ever saw, occupying an elbow of the Dart, and commanding a view up and down. We are here for but a week, my lectures beginning on the 13th. H. J. seems tranquil and happy in his work, though he has been much pestered of late by gout. I suppose you are rejoicing as much as I in the public interest finally aroused in the Philippine conquest. A personal scandal, it seems, is really the only thing that will wake the ordinary man's attention up. It should be the first aim of every good leader of opinion to rake up one on the opposite side. It should be introduced among our Faculty methods! Don't think, dear Norton, that you must answer this letter, which only your accident has made me write. We shall be home so soon that I shall see you face to face. The wife sends love, as I do, to you all. No warm weather whatever as yet--I am having chilblains!! Ever affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ R.M.S. IVERNIA, _June 18, 1902_. DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--We ought to be off Boston tonight. After a cold and wet voyage, including two days of head-gale and heavy sea, and one of unbroken fog with lugubriously moo-ing fog-horn, the sun has risen upon American weather, a strong west wind like champagne, blowing out of a saturated blue sky right in our teeth, the sea all effervescing and sparkling with white caps and lace, the strong sun lording it in the sky, and hope presiding in the heart. What more natural than to report all this happy turn of affairs to you, buried as you probably still are in the blankets of the London atmosphere, beautiful opalescent blankets though they be, and (when one's vitals once are acclimated) yielding more wonderful artistic effects than anything to be seen in America. "C'est le pays de la couleur," as my brother is fond of saying in the words of Alphonse Daudet! But no matter for international comparisons, which are the least profitable of human employments. Christ died for us all, so let us all be as we are, save where we want to reform ourselves. (The only unpardonable crime is that of wanting to reform _one another_, after the fashion of the U. S. in the Philippines.) ... Your sweet letter of several dates reached us just before we left Edinburgh--excuse the insipid adjective "sweet," which after all does express something which less simple vocables may easily miss--and gave an impression of harmony and inner health which it warms the heart to become sensible of. I understand your temptation to stay over, but I also understand your temptation to get back; and I imagine that more and more you will solve the problem by a good deal of alternation in future years. It is curious how utterly distinct the three countries of England, Ireland and Scotland are, which we so summarily lump together--Scotland so democratic and so much like New England in many respects. But it would be a waste of time for you to go there. Keep to the South and spend one winter in Rome, before you die, and a spring in the smaller Italian cities! I hope that Henry will have managed to get you and Miss Tuckerman to Rye for a day--it is so curiously quaint and characteristic. I had a bad conscience about leaving him, for I think he feels lonely as he grows old, and friends pass over to the majority. He and I are so utterly different in all our observances and springs of action, that we can't rightly judge each other. I even feel great shrinking from urging him to pay us a visit, fearing it might yield him little besides painful shocks--and, after all, what besides pain and shock _is_ the right reaction for anyone to make upon our vocalization and pronunciation? The careful consonants and musical cadences of the Scotchwomen were such a balm to the ear! I wish that you and poor Henry could become really intimate. He is at bottom a very tender-hearted and generous being! No more paper! so I cross! I wish when we once get settled again at Chocorua that we might enclose you under our roof, even if only for one night, on your way to or from the Merrimans. I should like to show you true simplicity. [_No signature_.] The Gifford Lectures were published as "The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature," in June, 1902. The immediate "popularity" of this psychological survey of man's religious propensities was great; and the continued sales of the book contributed not a little to relieve James of financial anxiety during the last years of his life. The cordiality with which theological journals and private correspondents of many creeds greeted the "Varieties," as containing a fair treatment of facts which other writers had approached with a sectarian or anti-theological bias, was striking. James was amused at being told that the book had "supplied the protestant pulpits with sermons for a twelve-month." Regarding himself as "a most protestant protestant," as he once said, he was especially pleased by the manner in which it was received by Roman Catholic reviewers. Certain philosophical conclusions were indicated broadly in the "Varieties" without being elaborated. The book was a survey, an examination, of the facts. James had originally conceived of the Gifford appointment as giving him "an opportunity for a certain amount of psychology and a certain amount of metaphysics," and so had thought of making the first series of lectures descriptive of man's religious propensities and the second series a metaphysical study of their satisfaction through philosophy. The psychological material had grown to unforeseen dimensions, and it ended by filling the book. The metaphysical study remained to be elaborated; and to such work James now turned. XIV 1902-1905 _The Last Period (I)--Philosophical Writing--Statements of Religious Relief_ JAMES now limited his teaching in Harvard University, as has been said, to half a course a year and tried to devote his working energies to formulating a statement of his philosophical conceptions. For two years he published almost nothing; then the essays which were subsequently collected in the volumes called "Pragmatism," "The Pluralistic Universe," "The Meaning of Truth," and "Essays in Radical Empiricism," began to appear in the philosophic journals, or were delivered as special lectures. Whenever he accepted invitations to lecture outside the College, as he still did occasionally, it was with the purpose of getting these conceptions expressed and of throwing them into the arena of discussion. But demands which correspondents and callers from all parts of the globe now made on his time and sympathy were formidable, for he could not rid himself of the habit of treating the most trivial of these with consideration, or acquire the habit of using a secretary. In this way there continued to be a constant drain on his strength. "It is probably difficult [thus he wrote wearily to Mr. Lutoslawski, who had begged him to collaborate with him on a book in 1904] for a man whose cerebral machine works with such facility as yours does to imagine the kind of consciousness of men like Flournoy and myself. The background of my consciousness, so far as my own achievements go, is composed of a _sense of impossibility_--a sense well warranted by the facts. For instance, two years ago, the 'Varieties' being published, I decided that everything was cleared and that my duty was immediately to begin writing my metaphysical system. Up to last October, when the academic year began, I had written some 200 pages of _notes_, _i.e._ disconnected _brouillons_. I hoped this year to write 400 or 500 pages of straight composition, and could have done so without the interruptions. As a matter of fact, with the best will in the world, I have written exactly 32 pages! For an academic year's work, that is not brilliant! You see that, when I refuse your request, it is, after a fashion, in order to save my own life. My working day is anyhow, _at best_, only three hours long--by working I mean writing and reading philosophy." This estimate of his "notes" was, as always, self-deprecatory; but there was no denying a great measure of truth to the statement. Frequently his health made it necessary for him to escape from Cambridge and his desk. These incidents will be noted separately wherever the context requires. Yet in spite of these difficulties and notwithstanding his complaints of constant frustration, the spirit with which James still did his work emerges from the essays of this time as well as from his letters. It was as if the years that had preceded had been years of preparation for just what he was now doing. At the age of sixty-three he turned to the formulation of his empirical philosophy with the eagerness of a schoolboy let out to play. Misunderstanding disturbed him only momentarily, opposition stimulated him, he rejoiced openly in the controversies which he provoked, and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that were the essence of his genius. His "truth" must prevail! the Absolute should suffer its death-blow! Flournoy, Bergson, Schiller, Papini, and others too were "on his side." He made merry at the expense of his critics, or bewailed the perversity of their opposition; but he always encouraged them to "lay on." The imagery of contest and battle appeared in the letters which he threw off, and he expressed himself as freely as only a man can who has outgrown the reserves of his youth. _To Henry L. Higginson._ CHOCORUA, _July 3, 1902_. DEAR HENRY,--Thanks for your letter of the other day, etc. Alice tells me of a queer conversation you and she had upon the cars. I am not anxious about money, beyond wishing not to live on capital.... As I have frequently said, I mean to support you in your old age. In fact the hope of that is about all that I now live for, being surfeited with the glory of academic degrees just escaped, like this last one which, in the friendliness of its heart, your [Harvard] Corporation designed sponging upon me at Commencement.[41] Boil it and solder it up from the microbes, and it may do for another year, if I am not in prison! The friendliness of such recognition is a delightful thing to a man about to graduate from the season of his usefulness. "La renommé vient," as I have heard John La Farge quote, "à ceux qui ont la patience d'attendre, et s'accroit à raison de leur imbecillité." Best wishes to you all. Yours ever, Wm. James. _To Miss Grace Norton._ CHOCORUA, _Aug. 29, 1902_. MY DEAR GRACE,--Will you kindly let me know, by the method of effacement, on the accompanying post-card, whether the box from Germany of which I wrote you some time ago has or has not yet been left at your house. I paid the express, over twenty dollars, on it three weeks ago, directing it to be left with you. The ice being thus broken, let me ramble on! How do-ist thou? And how is the moist and cool summer suiting thee? I hope, well! It has certainly been a boon to most people. Our house has been full of company of which tomorrow the last boys will leave, and I confess I shall enjoy the change to no responsibility. The scourge of life is _responsibility_--always there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous prostration" be suffered to be without it--they have trouble enough in any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my temper is liable to break; but I _walk_ somewhat as in old times, and that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful as ever--it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature. We are all well, and shall very soon be buzzing about Irving Street as of yore. Keep well yourself, dear Grace; and believe me ever your friend, Wm. James. To this word about enjoying the aspects of nature may be added a few lines from a letter to his son William, which James wrote from Europe in 1900:-- "Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of every thing else, almost, _surgit amari aliquid_; but from the days in the open air, never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever." _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ STONEHURST, INTERVALE, N. H., _Sept. 18, 1902_. DEAREST FANNY,--How long it is since we have exchanged salutations and reported progress! Happy the country which is without a history! _I_ have had no history to communicate, and I hope that you have had none either, and that the summer has glided away as happily for you as it has for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many ancient summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of "breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay. _Dang_ all schools and colleges, say I. Alice goes down tomorrow (I being up here with the Merrimans only for one day) to start Billy for Europe--he will spend the winter at Geneva University--and to get "the house" ready for our general reception on the 26th. I may possibly make out to stay up here till the Monday following, and spend the interval of a few days by myself among the mountains, having stuck to the domestic hearth unusually tight all summer.... We have had guests--too many of them, rather, at one time, for me--and a little reading has been done, mostly philosophical technics, which, by the strange curse laid upon Adam, certain of his descendants have been doomed to invent and others, still more damned, to learn. But I've also read Stevenson's letters, which everybody ought to read just to know how charming a human being can be, and I've read a good part of Goethe's _Gedichte_ once again, which are also to be read, so that one may realize how absolutely healthy an organization may every now and then eventuate into this world. To have such a lyrical gift and to treat it with so little solemnity, so that most of the output consists of mere escape of the over-tension into bits of occasional verse, irresponsible, unchained, like smoke-wreaths!--it _du_ give one a great impression of personal power. In general, though I'm a traitor for saying so, it seems to me that the German race has been a more massive organ of expression for the travail of the Almighty than the Anglo-Saxon, though we did seem to have something more like it in Elizabethan times. Or are clearness and dapperness the absolutely final shape of creation? Good-bye! dear Fanny--you see how mouldy I am temporarily become. The moment I take my pen, I can write in no other way. Write thou, and let me know that things are greener and more vernal where you are. Alice would send much love to you, were she here. Give mine to your mother, brother, and sister-in-law, and all. Your loving, W. J. _To Henry L. Higginson._ CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _Nov. 1, 1902_. DEAR HENRY,--I am emboldened to the step I am taking by the consciousness that though we are both at least sixty years old and have known each other from the cradle, I have never but once (or possibly twice) traded on your well-known lavishness of disposition to swell any "subscription" which I was trying to raise. Now the doomful hour has struck. The altar is ready, and I take the victim by the ear. I choose you for a victim because you still have some undesiccated human feeling about you and can think in terms of pure charity--for the love of God, without ulterior hopes of returns from the investment. The subject is a man of fifty who can be recommended to no other kind of a benefactor. His story is a long one, but it amounts to this, that Heaven made him with no other power than that of thinking and writing, and he has proved by this time a truly pathological inability to keep body and soul together. He is abstemious to an incredible degree, is the most innocent and harmless of human beings, isn't propagating his kind, has never had a dime to spend except for vital necessities, and never has had in his life an hour of what such as _we_ call freedom from care or of "pleasure" in the ordinary exuberant sense of the term. He is refinement itself mentally and morally; and his writings have all been printed in first-rate periodicals, but are too scanty to "pay." There's no excuse for him, I admit. But God made him; and after kicking and cuffing and prodding him for twenty years, I have now come to believe that he ought to be treated in charity pure and simple (even though that be a vice) and I want to guarantee him $350 a year as a pension to be paid to the Mills Hotel in Bleecker Street, New York, for board and lodging and a few cents weekly over and above. I will put in $150. I have secured $100 more. Can I squeeze £50 a year out of you for such a non-public cause? If not, don't reply and forget this letter. If "ja" and you think you really can afford it, and it isn't wicked, let me know, and I will dun you regularly every year for the $50. Yours as ever, Wm. James. It is a great compliment that I address you. Most men say of such a case, "Is the man deserving?" Whereas the real point is, "Does he need us?" What is deserving nowadays? * * * * * The beneficiary of this appeal was that same unfulfilled promise of a metaphysician who appeared as "X" on page 292 of the first volume--a man upon whom, in Cicero's phrase, none but a philosopher could look without a groan. There were more parallels to X's case than it would be permissible to cite here. James did not often appeal to others to help such men with money, but he did things for them himself, even after it had become evident that they could give nothing to the world in return, and even when they had exhausted his patience. "Damn your half-successes, your imperfect geniuses!" he exclaimed of another who shall be called Z. "I'm tired of making allowances for them and propping them up.... Z has never constrained himself in his life. Selfish, conceited, affected, a monster of desultory intellect, he has become now a seedy, almost sordid, old man without even any intellectual residuum from his work that can be called a finished construction; only 'suggestions' and a begging old age." But Z, too, was helped to the end. _To Henri Bergson._ Cambridge, _Dec. 14, 1902_. MY DEAR SIR,--I read the copy of your "Matière et Mémoire" which you so kindly sent me, immediately on receiving it, four years ago or more. I saw its great originality, but found your ideas so new and vast that I could not be sure that I fully understood them, although the _style_, Heaven knows, was lucid enough. So I laid the book aside for a second reading, which I have just accomplished, slowly and carefully, along with that of the "Données Immédiates," etc. I think I understand the main lines of your system very well at present--though of course I can't yet trace its proper relations to the aspects of experience of which you do not treat. It needs much building out in the direction of Ethics, Cosmology and Cosmogony, Psychogenesis, etc., before one can apprehend it fully. That I should take it in so much more easily than I did four years ago shows that even at the age of sixty one's mind can grow--a pleasant thought. It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique" did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills _my_ mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. The _Hauptpunkt_ acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the "transcendency" of the object will not recover from your treatment, and as I myself have been working for many years past on the same line, only with other general conceptions than yours, I find myself most agreeably corroborated. My health is so poor now that work goes on very slowly; but I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics which, in many of its fundamental ideas, agrees closely with what you have set forth and the agreement inspires and encourages me more than you can well imagine. It would take far too many words to attempt any detail, but some day I hope to send you the book.[42] How good it is sometimes simply to _break away_ from all old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things _ab initio_, making the lines of division fall into entirely new places! I send you a little popular lecture of mine on immortality,[43]--no positive theory but merely an _argumentum ad hominem_ for the ordinary cerebralistic objection,--in which it may amuse you to see a formulation like your own that the brain is an organ of _filtration_ for spiritual life. I also send you my last book, the "Varieties of Religious Experience," which may some time beguile an hour. Believe, dear Professor Bergson, the high admiration and regard with which I remain, always sincerely yours, Wm. James. _To Mrs. Louis Agassiz._ Cambridge, _Dec. 15, 1902_. DEAR MRS. AGASSIZ,--I never dreamed of your replying to that note of mine (of Dec. 5th). If you are replying to all the notes you received on that eventful day, it seems to me a rather heavy penalty for becoming an octogenarian.[44] But glad I am that you replied to mine, and so beautifully. Indeed I do remember the meeting of those two canoes, and the dance, over the river from Manaos; and many another incident and hour of that wonderful voyage.[45] I remember your freshness of interest, and readiness to take hold of everything, and what a blessing to me it was to have one civilized lady in sight, to keep the memory of cultivated conversation from growing extinct. I remember my own folly in wishing to return home after I came out of the hospital at Rio; and my general greenness and incapacity as a naturalist afterwards, with my eyes gone to pieces. It was all because my destiny was to be a "philosopher"--a fact which then I didn't know, but which only means, I think, that, if a man is good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy. But I'm going to write one book worthy of you, dear Mrs. Agassiz, and of the Thayer expedition, if I am spared a couple of years longer. I hope you were not displeased at the _applause_ the other night, as you went out. _I_ started it; if I hadn't, someone else would a moment later, for the tension had grown intolerable. How delightful about the Radcliffe building! Well, once more, dear Mrs. Agassiz, we both thank you for this beautiful and truly affectionate letter. Your affectionate, Wm. James. E. L. Godkin had recently died, and at the date of the next letter a movement was on foot to raise money for a memorial in commemoration of his public services. The money was soon subscribed and the Memorial took shape in the endowment of the Godkin Lectureship at Harvard. James had started discussion of the project at a meeting of the dinner Club and Henry L. Higginson had continued it in a letter to which the following replied. _To Henry L. Higginson._ Cambridge, _Feb. 8, 1903_. DEAR HENRY,--I am sorry to have given a wrong impression, and made you take the trouble of writing--nutritious though your letters be to receive. My motive in mentioning the Godkin testimonial was pure curiosity, and not desire to promote it. We were ten "liberals" together, and I wanted to learn how many of us had been alienated from Godkin by his temper in spite of having been influenced by his writing. I found that it was just about half and half. I never said--Heaven bear me witness--that I had learned more from G. than from anyone. I said I had got more _political_ education from him. You see the "Nation" took me at the age of 22--you were already older and wickeder. If you follow my advice now, you don't subscribe a cent to this memorial. _I_ shall subscribe $100, for mixed reasons. Godkin's "home life" was very different from his life against the world. When a man differed in type from him, and consequently reacted differently on public matters; he thought him a preposterous monster, pure and simple, and so treated him. He couldn't imagine a different kind of creature from himself in politics. But in private relations he was simplicity and sociability and affectionateness incarnate, and playful as a young opossum. I never knew his first wife well, but I admire the pluck and fidelity of the second, and I note your chivalrous remarks about the sex, including Mrs. W. J., to whom report has been made of them, making her blush with pleasure. Don't subscribe, dear Henry. I am not trying to raise subscriptions. You left too early Friday eve. Ever affectionately yours, W. J. James's college class finished its work at the end of the first half of the academic year, and in early February he turned for a few days to the thought of a Mediterranean voyage, as a vacation and a means of escape from Cambridge during the bad weather of March. While considering this plan, he cabled M. Bergson to inquire as to the possibility of a meeting in Paris or elsewhere. _To Henri Bergson._ Cambridge, _Feb. 25, 1903_. DEAR PROFESSOR BERGSON,--Your most obliging cablegram (with 8 words instead of four!) arrived duly a week ago, and now I am repenting that I ever asked you to send it, for I have been feeling so much less fatigued than I did a month ago, that I have given up my passage to the Mediterranean, and am seriously doubting whether it will be necessary to leave home at all. I _ought_ not to, on many grounds, unless my health imperatively requires it. Pardon me for having so frivolously stirred you up, and permit me at least to pay the cost (as far as I can ascertain it) of the despatch which you were so liberal as to send. There is still a bare possibility (for I am so strongly tempted) that I may, after the middle of March, take a cheaper vessel direct to England or to France, and spend ten days or so in Paris and return almost immediately. In that case, we could still have our interview. I think there must be great portions of your philosophy which you have not yet published, and I want to see how well they combine with mine. _Writing_ is too long and laborious a process, and I would not inflict on you the task of answering my questions by letter, so I will still wait in the hope of a personal interview some time. I am convinced that a philosophy of _pure experience_, such as I conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can be in any way the _causa fiendi_ of consciousness, has introduced a very sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories "insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me challenging you to answer me _par écrit_! I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de Métaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part, and wish that I might see in your _intuition métaphysique_ the full equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. _Neither_ seems to be a full equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that is just what _you_ mean. The _Syllabus_[46] which I sent you the other day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible, but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by hypotheses--I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours, { co-consciousness } that the question of { } (its conditions, etc.) { conscious synthesis } becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do _write_! Believe me, with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1903_. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--I forget whether I wrote you my applause or not, on reading your chapter on religious psychology in the "Archives." I thought it a splendid thing, and well adapted to set the subject in the proper light before students. Abauzit has written to me for authorization to translate my book, and both he and W. J., Junior, have quoted you as assured of his competency. I myself feel confident of it, and have given him the authorization required. Possibly you may supply him with as much of your own translation as you have executed, so that the time you have spent on the latter may not be absolutely lost. "Billy" also says that you have executed a review of Myers's book,[47] finding it a more difficult task than you had anticipated. I am highly curious to see what you have found to say. I, also, wrote a notice of the volumes, and found it exceeding difficult to know how to go at the job. At last I decided just to skeletonize the points of his reasoning, but on correcting the proof just now, what I have written seems deadly flat and unprofitable and makes me wish that I had stuck to my original intention of refusing to review the book at all. The fact is, such a book need not be _criticized_ at all at present. It is obviously too soon for it to be either refuted or established by mere criticism. It is a hypothetical construction of genius which must be kept hanging up, as it were, for new observations to be referred to. As the years accumulate these in a more favorable or in a more unfavorable sense, it will tend to stand or to fall. I confess that reading the volumes has given me a higher opinion than ever of Myers's constructive gifts, but on the whole a lower opinion of the objective solidity of the system. So many of the facts which form its pillars are still dubious.[48] Bill says that you were again convinced by Eusapia,[49] but that the conditions were not satisfactory enough (so I understood) to make the experiments likely to convince absent hearers. Forever baffling is all this subject, and I confess that I begin to lose my interest. Believe me, in whatever difficulties your review of Myers may have occasioned you, you have my fullest sympathy! Bill has had a perfectly splendid winter in Geneva, thanks almost entirely to your introductions, and to the generous manner in which you took him into your own family. I wish we could ever requite you by similar treatment of Henri, or of _ces demoiselles_. He seems to labor under an apprehension of not being able to make you all believe how appreciative and grateful he is, and he urges me to "Make you understand it" when I write. I imagine that you understand it anyhow, so far as he is concerned, so I simply assure you that _our_ gratitude here is of the strongest and sincerest kind. I imagine that this has been by far the most profitable and educative winter of his life, and I rejoice exceedingly that he has obtained in so short a time so complete a sense of being at home in, and so lively an affection for, the Swiss people and country. (As for _your_ family he has written more than once that the Flournoy family seems to be "the finest family" he has ever seen in his life.) His experience is a good measure of the improvement in the world's conditions. Thirty years ago _I_ spent nine months in Geneva--but in how inferior an "Academy," and with what inferior privileges and experiences! Never inside a private house, and only after three months or more familiar enough with other students to be admitted to Zofingue.[50] Ignorant of 1000 things which have come to my son and yours in the course of education. It _is_ a more evolved world, and no mistake. I find myself very tired and unable to work this spring, but I think it will depart when I get to the country, as we soon shall. I am neither writing nor lecturing, and reading nothing heavy, only Emerson's works again (divine things, some of them!) in order to make a fifteen-minute address about him on his centennial birthday. What I want to get at, and let no interruptions interfere, is (at last) my _system of tychistic and pluralistic philosophy of pure experience_. I wish, and even more ardently does Alice wish, that you and Mrs. Flournoy, and all the children, or any of them, might pay us a visit. I don't _urge_ you, for there is so little in America that pays one to come, except sociological observation. But in the big slow steamers, the voyage is always interesting--and once here, how happy we should be to harbor you. In any case, perhaps Henri and one of his sisters will come and spend a year. From the point of view of education, Cambridge is first-rate. Love to you all from us both. Wm. James. Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit. "I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that end get quite away from Boston and New York--really _see_ the country at large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all darksome and tangled. Some light may break--but meanwhile next Wednesday (awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside of New England and New York. _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _May 3, 1903_. ...Your long and _inhaltsvoll_ letter of April 10th arrived duly, and constituted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your message of an intended visit to these shores; and your letter made Alice positively overflow with joyous anticipations. On my part they are less unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the _désagréments_ to which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you. It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for example, which would reconcile _me_ most easily to abandoning my native country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic, and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the élite of mankind over here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend, and in your case far more than in that of most men. The _vocalization_ of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now _done_ with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which after a fashion you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice foresees Lowell [Institute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them--it is a sort of prostitution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice does. Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which _I_ get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the _banalité_ of the Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado, over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer months you could pass in an absolutely quiet way--if you wished to--at Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked, continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After June, 1904, _I_ shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the spring of 1904! I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by the nature of one's powers. Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in praise of him at Concord on the 25th--in company with Senator Hoar, T. W. Higginson, and Charles Norton--quite a _vieille garde_, to which I now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life--though the environment differs to suit the needs of the different psychophysical organism which you present. I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing here--queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever. Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality, though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street, 14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and writing down their names! I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself, joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H. H. has bought some five miles of the shore of Lake Champlain adjoining his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into.... What a devil of a bore your forced purchase of the unnecessary neighboring land must have been. _I_ am just buying 150 acres more at Chocorua, to round off our second estate there. Keep well and prolific--everyone speaks praise of your "Better Sort," which I am keeping for the country.... _To his Daughter._ FABYANS, N. H., _May 6, 1903_. SWEET MARY,--Although I wrote to thy mother this P.M. I can't refrain from writing to thee ere I go up to bed. I left Intervale at 3.30 under a cloudy sky and slight rain, passing through the gloomy Notch to Crawford's and then here, where I am lodged in a house full of working men, though with a good clean bedroom. I write this in the office, with an enormous air-tight stove, a parrot and some gold-fish as my companions. I took a slow walk of an hour and a half before supper over this great dreary mountain plateau, pent in by hills and woods still free from buds. Although it is only 1500 feet high, the air is real mountain air, soft and strong at once. I wish that you could have taken that four-hour drive with Topsy[51] and me this morning. You would already be well--it had so healing an influence. Poverty-stricken this New Hampshire country may be--weak in a certain sense, shabby, thin, pathetic--say all that, yet, like "Jenny," it _kissed_ me; and it is not _vulgar_--even H. J. can't accuse it of that--or of "stodginess," especially at this emaciated season. It remains pure, and clear and distinguished--Bless it! Once more, would thou hadst been along! I have just been reading Emerson's "Representative Men." What luminous truths he communicates about their home-life--for instance: "Nature never sends a Great Man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul"--namely your mother's! How he hits her off, and how I recognized whom he meant immediately. Kiss the dear tender-hearted thing. Common men also have their advantages. I have seen all day long such a succession of handsome, stalwart, burnt-faced, out-of-door workers as made me glad to be, however degenerate myself, one of their tribe. Splendid, honest, good-natured fellows. Good-night! I'm now going to bed, to read myself to sleep with a tiptop novel sent me by one Barry, an old pupil of mine. 'T is called "A Daughter of Thespis." Is this the day of your mother's great and noble lunch? If so, I pray that it may have gone off well. Kisses to her, and all. Your loving PAPA. The next letter describes the Emerson Centenary at Concord. The Address which James delivered was published in the special volume commemorative of the proceedings, and also in "Memories and Studies." _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ Cambridge, _May 26, 1903_. DEAREST FANNY,--On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon, though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the _train du monde_. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Saturday morning. But I went to Lincoln on Saturday P.M. and stayed over the Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at 7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up. I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously æsthetic or æsthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the _vieille garde_ who did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in fiction or poetry. It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address. I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from others of him, that there are only a few things that _can_ be said of him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear Fanny. I shall be back here by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer. Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate Wm. James. The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the reply, in its turn, elicited this response:-- _To Henry James._ CHOCORUA, _June 6, 1903_. DEAREST HENRY,--Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say _today_--merely to let you see how the prospect exhilarates us. August, 1904, will be an excellent time to begin. I should like to go South with you,--possibly to Cuba,--but as for California, I fear the expense. I am sending you a decidedly moving book by a mulatto ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta (Georgia) negro College.[52] Read Chapters VII to XI for local color, etc. We have been up here for ten days; the physical luxury of the simplification is something that money can't buy. Every breath is a pleasure--this in spite of the fact that the whole country is drying up and burning up--it makes one ashamed that one can be so happy. The smoke here has been so thick for five days that the opposite shore [of the Lake] is hidden. We have a first-rate hired man, a good cow, nice horse, dog, cook, second-girl, etc. Come up and see us in August, 1904! Your ever loving W. J. _To Henry W. Rankin._ CHOCORUA, _June 10, 1903_. MY DEAR RANKIN,--Once more has my graphophobia placed me heavily in your debt. Your two long letters, though unanswered, were and are appreciated, in spite of the fact that, as you know, I do not (and I fear cannot) follow the gospel scheme as you do, and that the Bible itself, in both its testaments (omitting parts of John and the Apocalypse) seems to me, by its intense naturalness and humanness, the most fatal document that one can read against the orthodox theology, in so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis. I myself believe that the orthodox theology contains elements that are permanently true, and that such writers as Emerson, by reason of their extraordinary healthy-mindedness and "once-born"-ness, are incapable of appreciating. I believe that they will have to be expressed in any ultimately valid religious philosophy; and I see in the temper of friendliness of such a man as you for such writings as Emerson's and mine (_magnus comp. parvo_) a foretaste of the day when the abstract essentials of belief will be the basis of communion more than the particular forms and concrete doctrines in which they articulate themselves. Your letter about Emerson seemed to me so admirably written that I was on the point of sending it back to you, thinking it might be well that you should publish it somewhere. I will still do so, if you ask me. I have myself been a little scandalized at the non-resisting manner in which orthodox sheets have celebrated his anniversary. An "Emerson number" of "Zion's Herald" strikes me as _tant soit peu_ of an anomaly, and yet I am told that such a number appeared. Rereading him _in extenso_, almost _in toto_, lately, has made him loom larger than ever to me as a human being, but I feel the distinct lack in him of too little understanding of the morbid side of life. I have been in the country two weeks, delicious in spite of drought and smoke, and still more delicious now that rain has come, and I cannot bear to think of you still lingering in Brooklyn. Perhaps you are already at Northfield. Indeed I hope so, and that the long Brooklyn winter will have put you in a condition for its better enjoyment, and for better cooperation with its work. I shall get at Shields some day--but I'm slow in getting round! Yours ever faithfully, Wm. James. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Aug. 18, 1903_. DEAR M.,-- ...I am in good condition, but in somewhat of a funk about my lectures,[53] now that the audience draws near. I have got my mind working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again and inwardly sick with the fever. But I verily believe that it is only work that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old shells and getting a step ahead. It is a sort of madness however when it is on you. The total result is to make me admire "Common Sense" as having done by far the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy when it reduced the chaos of crude experience to order by its luminous _Denkmittel_ of the stable "thing," and its dualism of thought and matter. I find Strong's book charming and a wonderful piece of clear and thorough work--quite classical in fact, and surely destined to renown. The Clifford-Prince-Strong theory has now full rights to citizenship. Nevertheless, in spite of his so carefully blocking every avenue which leads sideways from his conclusion, he has not convinced me yet. But I can[not] say briefly why.... Yours in haste, W. J. _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ HOTEL ----, PORT HENRY, N.Y., _Aug. 22, 1903_. DEAR FRIEND,--Obliged to "stop over" for the night at this loathsome spot, for lack of train connexion, what is more natural than that I should seek to escape the odious actual by turning to the distant Ideal--by which term you will easily recognize _Yourself_. I didn't write the conventional letter to you after leaving your house in June, preferring to wait till the tension should accumulate, and knowing your indulgence of my unfashionable ways. I haven't heard a word about you since that day, but I hope that the times have treated you kindly, and that you have not been "overdoing" in your usual naughty way. I, with the exception of six days lately with the Merrimans, have been sitting solidly at home, and have found myself in much better condition than I was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It is pleasant to find that one's organism has such reparative capacities even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be _epoch-machend_ at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot--as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!--I am on my way from Ashfield, where I was a guest at the annual dinner, to _feu_ Davidson's "school" at Glenmore, where, in a sanguine hour, I agreed to give five discourses. Apparently they are having a good season there. Mrs. Booker Washington was the hero of the Ashfield occasion--a big hearty handsome natural creature, quite worthy to be her husband's mate. Fred Pollock made a tip-top speech.... Charles Norton appeared to great advantage as a benignant patriarch, and the place was very pretty. Have you read Loti's "Inde sans les Anglais"? If not, then begin. I seem to myself to have been doing some pretty good reading this summer, but when I try to recall it, nothing but philosophic works come up. Good-bye! and Heaven keep you! Yours affectionately, W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ CHOCORUA, _Sept. 24, 1903_. DEAREST FANNY,--It is so long since we have held communion that I think it is time to recommence. Our summer is ending quietly enough, not only you, but Theodora and Mary Tappan, having all together conspired to leave us in September solitude, and some young fellows, companions of Harry and Billy, having just gone down. The cook goes tomorrow for a fortnight of vacation, but Alice and I, and probably both the older boys, hope to stay up here more or less until the middle of October. My "seminary" begins on Friday, October 2nd, and for the rest of the year Friday is my only day with a college exercise in it--an arrangement which leaves me extraordinarily free, and of which I intend to take advantage by making excursions. Hitherto, during the entire 30 years of my College service, I have had a midday exercise every day in the week. This has always kept me tied too tight to Cambridge. I am _vastly_ better in nervous tone than I was a year ago, my work is simplified down to the exact thing I want to do, and I ought to be happy in spite of the lopping off of so many faculties of activity. The only thing to do, as with the process of the suns one finds one's faculties dropping away one by one, is to be good-natured about it, remember that the next generation is as young as ever, and try to live and have a sympathetic share in their activities. I spent three days lately (only three, alas!) at the "Shanty" [in Keene Valley], and was moved to admiration at the foundation for a consciousness that was being laid in the children by the bare-headed and bare-legged existence "close to nature" of which the memory was being stored up in them in these years. They lay around the camp-fire at night at the feet of their elders, in every attitude of soft recumbency, heads on stomachs and legs mixed up, happy and dreamy, just like the young of some prolific carnivorous species. The coming generation ought to reap the benefit of all this healthy animality. What wouldn't I give to have been educated in it!... _To Mrs. Henry Whitman._ Cambridge, _Oct. 29, 1903_. MY DEAR "S. W.,"--On inquiry at your studio last Monday I was told that you would be in the country for ten days or a fortnight more. I confess that this pleased me much for it showed you both happy and prudent. Surely the winter is long enough, however much we cut off of this end--the city winter I mean; and the country this month has been little short of divine. We came down on the 16th, and I have to get mine (my country, I mean) from the "Norton Woods." But they are very good indeed,--indeed, indeed! I am better, both physically and morally, than for years past. The whole James family thrives; and were it not for one's "duties" one could be happy. But that things should give pain proves that something is being _effected_, so I take that consolation. I have the duty on Monday of reporting at a "Philosophical Conference" on the Chicago School of Thought. Chicago University has during the past six months given birth to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result is wonderful--a _real school_, and _real Thought_. Important thought, too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we have thought, but no school. At Yale a school, but no thought. Chicago has both.... But this, dear Madam, is not intended as a letter--only a word of greeting and congratulation at your absence. I don't know why it makes me so happy to hear of anyone being in the country. I suppose _they_ must be happy. Your last letter went to the right spot--but I don't expect to hear from you now until I see you. Ever affectionately yours, W. J. _To Henry James._ NEWPORT, _Jan. 20, 1904_. ...I came down here the night before last, to see if a change of air might loosen the grip of my influenza, now in its sixth week and me still weak as a baby, almost, from its virulent effects.... Yesterday A.M. the thermometer fell to 4 below zero. I walked as far as Tweedy's (I am staying at a boarding-house, Mrs. Robinson's, Catherine St., close to Touro Avenue, Daisy Waring being the only other boarder)--the snow loudly creaking under foot and under teams however distant, the sky luminously white and dazzling, no distance, everything equally near to the eye, and the architecture in the town more huddled, discordant, cheap, ugly and contemptible than I had ever seen it. It brought back old times so vividly. So it did in the evening, when I went after sunset down Kay Street to the termination. That low West that I've so often fed on, with a sombre but intense crimson vestige smouldering close to the horizon-line, economical but profound, and the western well of sky shading upward from it through infinite shades of transparent luminosity in darkness to the deep blue darkness overhead. It was purely American. You never see that western sky anywhere else. Solemn and wonderful. I should think you'd like to see it again, if only for the sake of shuddering at it!... _To François Pillon._ Cambridge, _June 12, 1904_. DEAR PILLON,--Once more I get your faithful and indefatigable "Année" and feel almost ashamed of receiving it thus from you, year after year, when I make nothing of a return! So you are 75 years old--I had no idea of it, but thought that you were much younger. I am only(!) 62, and wish that I could expect another 13 years of such activity as you have shown. I fear I cannot. My arteries are senile, and none of my ancestors, so far as I know of them, have lived past 72, many of them dying much earlier. This is my last day in Cambridge; tomorrow I get away into the country, where "the family" already is, for my vacation. I shall take your "Année" with me, and shall be greatly interested in both Danriac's article and yours. What a mercy it is that your eyes, in spite of cataract-operations, are still good for reading. I have had a very bad winter for work--two attacks of influenza, one very long and bad, three of gout, one of erysipelas, etc., etc. I expected to have written at least 400 or 500 pages of my magnum opus,--a general treatise on philosophy which has been slowly maturing in my mind,--but I have written only 32 pages! That tells the whole story. I resigned from my professorship, but they would not accept my resignation, and owing to certain peculiarities in the financial situation of our University just now, I felt myself obliged in honor to remain. My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a "tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making. It is theistic, but not _essentially_ so. It rejects all doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to the question of the Infinite the great methodological importance which you and Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system too _bottomless_ and romantic. I am sure that, be it in the end judged true or false, it is essential to the evolution of clearness in philosophic thought that _someone_ should defend a pluralistic empiricism radically. And all that I fear is that, with the impairment of my working powers from which I suffer, the Angel of Death may overtake me before I can get my thoughts on to paper. Life here in the University consists altogether of _interruptions_. I thought much of you at the time of Renouvier's death, and I wanted to write; but I let that go, with a thousand other things that had to go. What a life! and what touching and memorable last words were those which M. Pratt published in the "Revue de Métaphysique"--memorable, I mean from the mere fact that the old man could dictate them at all. I have left unread his last publications, except for some parts of the "Monadologie" and the "Personalisme." He will remain a great figure in philosophic history; and the sense of his absence must make a great difference to your consciousness and to that of Madame Pillon. My own wife and children are well.... Ever affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _June 28, 1904_. DEAR H.,--I came down from Chocorua yesterday A.M. to go to-- Mrs. Whitman's funeral! She had lost ground steadily during the winter. The last time I saw her was five weeks ago, when at noon I went up to her studio thinking she might be there.... She told me that she was to go on the following day to the Massachusetts General Hospital, for a cure of rest and seclusion. There she died last Friday evening, having improved in her cardiac symptoms, but pneumonia supervening a week ago. It's a great mercy that the end was so unexpectedly quick. What I had feared was a slow deterioration for a year or more to come, with all the nameless misery--peculiarly so in her case--of death by heart disease. As it was, she may be said to have died standing, a thing she always wished to do. She went to every dinner-party and evening party last winter, had an extension, a sort of ball-room, built to her Mount Vernon house, etc. The funeral was beautiful both in Trinity Church and at the grave in Mt. Auburn. I was one of the eight pall-bearers--the others of whom you would hardly know. The flowers and greenery had been arranged in absolutely Whitmanian style by Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Henry Parkman, and Sally Fairchild. The scene at the grave was _beautiful_. She had no blood relatives, and all Boston--I mean the few whom we know--had gone out, and seemed swayed by an overpowering emotion which abolished all estrangement and self-consciousness. It was the sort of ending that would please her, could she know of it. An extraordinary and indefinable creature! I used often to feel coldly towards her on account of her way of taking people as a great society "business" proceeding, but now that her agitated life of tip-toe reaching in so many directions, of genuinest amiability, is over, pure tenderness asserts its own. Against that dark background of natural annihilation she seems to have been a pathetic little slender worm, writhing and curving blindly through its little day, expending such intensities of consciousness to terminate in that small grave. She was a most peculiar person. I wish that you had known her whole life here more intimately, and understood its significance. You might then write a worthy article about her. For me, it is impossible to define her. She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston. I have often wondered whether I should survive her--and here it has come in the night, without the sound of a footstep, and the same world is here--but without her as its witness.... _To Charles Eliot Norton._ Cambridge, _June 30, 1904_. DEAR CHARLES,--I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to me immortal documents--as the clouds clear away he will surely take his stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes. The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great Heart alone visible. Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed too much regard for yourself. The point should have been _his_ expression of that sort of thing--no matter to whom addressed! I understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere him perhaps the more for it.... S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like closing the ranks. Affectionately--to all of you--including Theodora, W. J. _To L. T. Hobhouse._ CHOCORUA, _Aug. 12, 1904_. DEAR BROTHER HOBHOUSE,--Don't you think it a _tant soit peu_ scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent--I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 _ff_.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the _Right_ to Believe) in the guise of an _alternative and substitute_ for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, _substitute a travesty_ for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely _vetoed_, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from _my_ polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk. Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me, seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe unreservedly to almost every positive word.--I say "positive," for I doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating effect of mind-_cum_-philosophy on certain people to justify your somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91) reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other sanctimonious come-offs.--Could you not have made an equally sympathetic reading of _me_? I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a "summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear? I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object. Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties. In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of your essay he will deem you altogether on his side. Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I _don't_ mean _copy_) my views so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden. Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you ought to know better!), Yours faithfully, Wm. James. _To Edwin D. Starbuck._ SALISBURY, CONN. _Aug, 24, 1904_. DEAR STARBUCK,-- ...Of the strictures you make [in your review of my "Varieties"], the first one (undue emphasis on extreme case) is, I find, almost universally made; so it must in some sense be correct. Yet it would never do to study the passion of love on examples of ordinary liking or friendly affection, or that of homicidal pugnacity on examples of our ordinary impatiences with our kind. So here it must be that the extreme examples let us more deeply into the secrets of the religious life, explain why the tamer ones value their religion so much, tame though it be, because it is so continuous with a so much acuter ideal. But I have long been conscious that there is on this matter something to be said which neither my critics have said, nor I can say, and which I must therefore commit to the future. The second stricture (in your paragraph 4 on pages 104 _ff_.) is of course deeply important, if true. At present I can see but vaguely just what sort of outer relations our inner organism might respond to, which our feelings and intellect interpret by religious thought. You ought to work your program for all it is worth in the way of growth in definiteness. I look forward with great eagerness to your forthcoming book, and meanwhile urge strongly that you should publish the advance article you speak of in Hall's new Journal. I can't see any possible risk. It will objectify a part of your material for you, and possibly, by arousing criticism, enable you to strengthen your points. Your third stricture, about Higher Powers, is also very important, and I am not at all sure that you may not be right. I have frankly to confess that my "Varieties" carried "theory" as far as I could then carry it, and that I can carry it no farther today. I can't see clearly over that edge. Yet I am sure that tracks have got to be made there--I think that the fixed point with me is the conviction that our "rational" consciousness touches but a portion of the real universe and that our life is fed by the "mystical" region as well. I have no mystical experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism in me to recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it. I was much disappointed in Leuba's review of my book in the "International Journal of Ethics." ... I confess that the way in which he stamps out all mysticism whatever, using the common pathological arguments, seemed to me unduly crude. I wrote him an expostulatory letter, which evidently made no impression at all, and which he possibly might send you if you had the curiosity to apply. I am having a happy summer, feeling quite hearty again. I congratulate you on being settled, though I know nothing of the place. I congratulate you and Mrs. Starbuck also on airy fairy Lilian, who makes, I believe, the third. Long may they live and make their parents proud. With best regards to you both, I am yours ever truly, Wm. James. The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the passage which follows. _To James Henry Leuba._ Cambridge, _Apr. 17, 1904_. ...My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my _active_ life, is limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of _Gottesbewustsein_ in the directer and stronger sense, yet there is _something in me_ which _makes response_ when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, "_thither lies truth_"--and I am _sure_ it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical _germ_. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but _interpretative_ criticism (not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure _non possumus_: "Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore they are _nothing_, for anyone else than their owner." Why may they not be _something_, although not everything? Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I believe, is where we all should _unhesitatingly_ be today. Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential. I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all. _I_ hate to reply to anybody, and will sympathize with your silence. But I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly, Wm. James. The following document is not a letter, but a series of answers to a questionnaire upon the subject of religious belief, which was sent out in 1904 by Professor James B. Pratt of Williams College, and to which James filled out a reply at an unascertained date in the autumn of that year. QUESTIONNAIRE[55] It is being realized as never before that religion, as one of the most important things in the life both of the community and of the individual, deserves close and extended study. Such study can be of value only if based upon the personal experiences of many individuals. If you are in sympathy with such study and are willing to assist in it, will you kindly write out the answers to the following questions and return them with this questionnaire, as soon as you conveniently can, to JAMES B. PRATT, 20 Shepard Street, Cambridge, Mass. Please answer the questions at length and in detail. Do not give philosophical generalizations, but your own personal experience. 1. What does religion mean to you personally? Is it (1) A belief that something exists? _Yes._ (2) An emotional experience? _Not powerfully so, yet a_ social _reality_. (3) A general attitude of the will toward God or toward righteousness! _It involves these._ (4) Or something else? If it has several elements, which is for you the most important? _The social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., when things are going wrong with my causes (my truth denied)_, etc. 2. What do you mean by God? _A combination of Ideality and (final) efficacity._ (1) Is He a person--if so, what do you mean by His being a person? _He must be cognizant and responsive in some way._ (2) Or is He only a Force? _He must_ do. (3) Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you? _Yes, but more conscious. "God" to me, is not the only spiritual reality to believe in. Religion means primarily a universe of spiritual relations surrounding the earthly practical ones, not merely relations of "value," but agencies and their activities. I suppose that the chief premise for my hospitality towards the religious testimony of others is my conviction that "normal" or "sane" consciousness is so small a part of actual experience. What e'er be true, it is not true exclusively, as philistine scientific opinion assumes. The other kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much wider universe of experiences, from which our belief selects and emphasizes such parts as best satisfy our needs._ How do you apprehend his relation to mankind } and to you personally? } } _Uncertain._ If your position on any of these matters is uncertain, } please state the fact. } 3. Why do you believe in God? Is it (1) From some argument? _Emphatically, no._ Or (2) Because you have experienced His presence? _No, but rather because I need it so that it "must" be true._ Or (3) From authority, such as that of the Bible or of some prophetic person? _Only the whole tradition of religious people, to which something in me makes admiring response._ Or (4) From any other reason? _Only for the social reasons._ If from several of these reasons, please indicate carefully the order of their importance. 4. Or do you not so much _believe_ in God as want to _use_ Him? _I can't use him very definitely, yet I believe._ Do you accept Him not so much as a real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by? _More as a more powerful ally of my own ideals._ If you should become thoroughly convinced that there was no God, would it make any great difference in your life--either in happiness, morality, or in other respects? _Hard to say. It would surely make some difference._ 5. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend, though different? _Dimly [real]; not [as an earthly friend]._ Do you feel that you have experienced His presence? If so, please describe what you mean by such an experience. _Never._ How vague or how distinct is it? How does it affect you mentally and physically? If you have had no such experience, do you accept the testimony of others who claim to have felt God's presence directly? Please answer this question with special care and in as great detail as possible. _Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something similar that makes response._ 6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it purely from habit, and social custom, or do you really believe that God hears your prayers? _I can't possibly pray--I feel foolish and artificial._ Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided--_i.e._, do you sometimes feel that in prayer you receive something--such as strength or the divine spirit--from God? Is it a real communion? 7. What do you mean by "spirituality"? _Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of "other worldly" fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality, or "taste."_ Describe a typical spiritual person. _Phillips Brooks._ 8. Do you believe in personal immortality? _Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older._ If so, why? _Because I am just getting fit to live._ 9. Do you accept the Bible as _authority_ in religious matters? Are your religious faith and your religious life based on it? If so, how would your belief in God and your life toward Him and your fellow men be affected by loss of faith in the _authority_ of the Bible? _No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it._ 10. What do you mean by a "religious experience"? _Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more "home" to one._ _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ CHOCORUA, _Sept. 21, 1904_. DEAR PAULINE,--Alice went off this morning to Cambridge, to get the house ready for the advent of the rest of us a week hence--viz., Wednesday the 28th. Having breakfasted at 6:30 to bid her God speed, the weather was so lordly fine (after a heavy rain in the night) that I trudged across lots to our hill-top, which you never saw, and now lie there with my back against a stone, scribbling you these lines at half-past nine. The vacation has run down with an appalling rapidity, but all has gone well with us, and I have been extraordinarily well and happy, and mean to be a good boy all next winter, to say nothing of remoter futures. My brother Henry stayed a delightful fortnight, and seemed to enjoy nature here intensely--found so much _sentiment_ and feminine delicacy in it all. It is a pleasure to be with anyone who takes in things through the eyes. Most people don't. The two "savans" who were here noticed _absolutely nothing_, though they had never been in America before. Naturally I have wondered what things your eyes have been falling on. Many views from hill-tops? Many magic dells and brooks? I hope so, and that it has all done you endless good. Such a green and gold and scarlet morn as this would raise the dead. I hope that your sister Susan has also got great good from the summer, and that the fair Josephine is glad to be at home again, and your mother reconciled to losing you. Perhaps even now you are preparing to go down. I have only written as a _Lebenszeichen_ and to tell you of our dates. I expect no reply, till you write a word to say when you are to come to Boston. Unhappily we can't ask you to Irving St, being mortgaged three deep to foreigners. Ever yours, W. J. It will be recalled that the St. Louis Exposition had occurred shortly before the date of the last letter and had led a number of learned and scientific associations to hold international congresses in America. James kept away from St. Louis, but asked several foreign colleagues to visit him at Chocorua or in Cambridge before their return to Europe. Among them were Dr. Pierre Janet of Paris and his wife, Professor C. Lloyd Morgan of Bristol, and Professor Harold Höffding of Copenhagen. _To F. C. S. Schiller._ Cambridge, _Oct. 26, 1904_. DEAR SCHILLER,-- ...Last night the Janets left us--a few days previous, Lloyd Morgan. I am glad to possess my soul for a while alone. Make much of dear old Höffding, who is a good pluralist and irrationalist. I took to him immensely and so did everybody. Lecturing to my class, he told against the Absolutists an anecdote of an "American" child who asked his mother if God made the world in six days. "Yes."--"The whole of it?"--"Yes."--"Then it is finished, all done?"--"Yes."--"Then in what business now is God?" If he tells it in Oxford you must reply: "Sitting for his portrait to Royce, Bradley, and Taylor." Don't return the "McGill Quarterly"!--I have another copy. Good-bye! W. J. _To F. J. E. Woodbridge._ Cambridge, _Feb. 6, 1905_. DEAR WOODBRIDGE,--I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth boils over from my organism as muddy water from a Yellowstone Geyser. Here is another contribution to my radical empiricism, which I send hot on the heels of the last one. I promise that, with the possible exception of one post-scriptual thing, not more than eight pages of MS. long, I shall do no more writing this academic year. So if you accept this,[56] you have not much more to fear.... I think, on the whole, that though the present article directly hitches on to the last words of my last article, "The Thing and Its Relations," the article called the "Essence of Humanism" had better appear before it.... Always truly yours Wm. James. _To Edwin D. Starbuck._ Cambridge, _Feb. 12, 1905_. DEAR STARBUCK,--I have read your article in No. 2 of Hall's Journal with great interest and profit. It makes me eager for the book, but pray take great care of your style in that--it seems to me that this article is less well written than your "Psychology of Religion" was, less clear, more involved, more technical in language--probably the result of rapidity. Our American philosophic literature is dreadful from a literary point of view. Pierre Janet told me he thought it was much worse than German stuff--and I begin to believe so; technical and semi-technical language, half-clear thought, fluency, and no composition! Turn your face resolutely the other way! But I didn't start to say this. Your thought in this article is both important and original, and ought to be worked out in the clearest possible manner.... Your thesis needs to be worked out with great care, and as concretely as possible. It is a difficult one to put successfully, on account of the vague character of all its terms. One point you should drive home is that the anti-religious attitudes (Leuba's, Huxley's, Clifford's), so far as there is any "pathos" in them, obey exactly the same logic. The real crux is when you come to define objectively the ideals to which feeling reacts. "God is a Spirit"--_darauf geht es an_--on the last available definition of the term Spirit. It may be very abstract. Love to Mrs. Starbuck. Yours always truly, Wm. James. _To F. J. E. Woodbridge._ [_Feb. 22, 1905._] DEAR WOODBRIDGE,--Here's another! But I solemnly swear to you that this shall be my very last offense for some months to come. This is the "postscriptual" article[57] of which I recently wrote you, and I have now cleaned up the pure-experience philosophy from all the objections immediately in sight.... Truly yours, Wm. James. XV 1905-1907 _The Last Period (II)--Italy and Greece--Philosophical Congress in Rome--Stanford University--The Earthquake--Resignation of Professorship_ In the spring of 1905 an escape from influenza, from Cambridge duties, and from correspondents, became imperative. James had long wanted to see Athens with his own eyes, and he sailed on April 3 for a short southern holiday. During the journey he wrote letters to almost no one except his wife. On his way back from Athens he stopped in Rome with the purpose of seeing certain young Italian philosophers. A Philosophical Congress was being held there at the time; and James, though he had originally declined the invitation to attend it, inevitably became involved in its proceedings and ended by seizing the occasion to discuss his theory of consciousness. It was obvious that the appropriate language in which to address a full meeting of the Congress would be French, and so he shut himself up in his hotel and composed "La Notion de Conscience." His experience in writing this paper threw an instructive sidelight on his process of composition. Ordinarily--when he was writing in English--twenty-five sheets of manuscript, written in a large hand and corrected, were a maximum achievement for one day. The address in Rome was not composed in English and then translated, but was written out in French. When he had finished the last lines of one day's work, James found to his astonishment that he had completed and corrected over forty pages of manuscript. The inhibitions which a habit of careful attention to points of style ordinarily called into play were largely inoperative when he wrote in a language which presented to his mind a smaller variety of possible expressions, and thus imposed limits upon his self-criticism. In the following year (1906), James took leave of absence from Harvard in January and accepted an invitation from Stanford University to give a course during its spring term. He planned the course as a general introduction to Philosophy. Had he not been interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake, he would have rehearsed much of the projected "Introductory Textbook of Philosophy," in which he meant to outline his metaphysical system. But the earthquake put an end to the Stanford lectures in April, as the reader will learn more fully. In the ensuing autumn and winter (1907), James made the same material the basis of a half-year's work with his last Harvard class. In November, 1906, the lectures which compose the volume called "Pragmatism" were written out and delivered in November at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In January, 1907, they were repeated at Columbia University, and then James published them in the spring. The time had now come for him to stop regular teaching altogether. He had been continuing to teach, partly in deference to the wishes of the College; but it had become evident that he must have complete freedom to use his strength and time for writing when he could write, for special lectures, like the series on Pragmatism, when such might serve his ends, and for rest and change when recuperation became necessary. So, in February, 1907, he sent his resignation to the Harvard Corporation. The last meeting of his class ended in a way for which he was quite unprepared. His undergraduate students presented him with a silver loving-cup, the graduate students and assistants with an inkwell. There were a couple of short speeches, and words were spoken by which he was very much moved. Unfortunately there was no record of what was said. _To Mrs. James._ AMALFI, _Mar. 30, 1905_. ...It is good to get something in full measure, without haggling or stint, and today I have had the picturesque ladled out in buckets full, heaped up and running over. I never realized the beauties of this shore, and forget (in my habit of never noticing proper names till I have been there) whether you have ever told me of the drive from Sorrento to this place. Anyhow, I wish that you could have taken it with me this day. "Thank God for this day!" We came to Sorrento by steamer, and at 10:30 got away in a carriage, lunching at the half-way village of Positano; and proceeding through Amalfi to Ravello, high up on the mountain side, whence back here in time for a 7:15 o'clock dinner. Practically six hours driving through a scenery of which I had never realized the beauty, or rather the interest, from previous descriptions. The lime-stone mountains are as _strong_ as anything in Switzerland, though of course much smaller. The road, a _Cornice_ affair cut for the most part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches) on the side of which nestle hamlets, is positively ferocious in its grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming like a bed of violets. I didn't look for such Swiss strength, having heard of naught but beauty. It seems as if this were a race such that, when anyone wished to express an emotion of any kind, he went and built a bit of stone-wall and limed it onto the rock, so that now, when they have accumulated, the works of God and man are inextricably mixed, and it is as if mankind had been a kind of immemorial coral insect. Every possible square yard is terraced up, reclaimed and planted, and the human dwellings are the fiercest examples of cliff-building, cave-habitation, staircase and foot-path you can imagine. How I do wish that you could have been along today.... _Mar. 31, 1905_. From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through the _old_ Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva and Paris afforded--but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself--full orchestra. I have got such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially in the country. A smile will go so far with them--even without the accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learn _Italian_ (real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a sentimental song or two, bring a tambourine or banjo, and come down here and fraternize with the common people along the coast--he can go far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night.... _To his Daughter._ On board S.S. Orénogne, approaching PIRÆUS, GREECE, _Apr. 3, 1905_. DARLING PEG,--Your loving Dad is surely in luck sailing over this almost oily sea, under the awning on deck, past the coast of Greece (whose snow-capped mountains can be seen on the horizon), towards the Piræus, where we are due to arrive at about two. I had some misgivings about the steamer from Marseilles, but she has turned out splendid, and the voyage perfect. A 4000-ton boat, bran new as to all her surface equipment, stateroom all to myself, by a happy stroke of luck (the boat being full), clean absolutely, large open window, sea like Lake Champlain, with the color of Lake Leman, about a hundred and twenty first-class passengers of the most interesting description, one sixth English archeologists, one sixth English tourists, one third French archeologists, etc.,--an international archeological congress opens at Athens this week,--the rest Dagoes _quelconques_, many distinguished men, almost all educated and pronounced individualities, and so much acquaintance and sociability, that the somewhat small upper deck on which I write resounds with conversation like an afternoon tea. The meals are tip-top, and the whole thing almost absurdly ideal in its kind. I only wish your mother could be wafted here for one hour, to sit by my side and enjoy the scene. The best feature of the boat is little Miss Boyd, the Cretan excavatress, from Smith College, a perfect little trump of a thing, who has been through the Greco-Turkish war as nurse (as well as being nurse at Tampa during our Cuban war), and is the simplest, most generally intelligent little thing, who knows Greece by heart and can smooth one's path beautifully. Waldstein of Cambridge is on board, also M. Sylvain of the Théâtre Français, and his daughter--going to recite prologues or something at the representation of Sophocles's "Antigone," which is to take place--he looking just like your uncle Henry--both eminent comedians--I mean the two Sylvains. On the bench opposite me is the most beautiful woman on board, a sort of Mary Salter translated into French, though she is with rather common men. Well, now I will stop, and use my Zeiss glass on the land, which is getting nearer. My heart wells over with love and gratitude at having such a family--meaning Alice, you, Harry, Bill, Aleck, and Mother-in-law--and resolutions to live so as to be more worthy of them. I will finish this on land. * * * * * Well, dear family,--We got in duly in an indescribable _embrouillement_ of small boats (our boatman, by the way, when Miss Boyd asked him his name, replied "Dionysos"; our wine-bottle was labelled "John Solon and Co."), sailing past the Island of Ægina and the Bay of Salamis, with the Parthenon visible ahead--a worthy termination to a delightful voyage. We drove the three miles from the Piræus in a carriage, common and very dusty country road, also close by the Parthenon, through the cheap little town to this hotel, after which George Putnam and I, washing our hands, strolled forth to see what we could, the first thing being Mrs. Sam Hoar at the theatre of Bacchus. Then the rest of the Acropolis, which is all and more than all the talk. There is a mystery of _rightness_ about that Parthenon that I cannot understand. It sets a standard for other human things, showing that absolute rightness is not out of reach. But I am not in descriptive mood, so I spare you. Suffice it that I couldn't keep the tears from welling into my eyes. "J'ai vu la beauté parfaite." Santayana is in a neighboring hotel, but we have missed each other thrice. The Forbeses are on the Peloponnesus, but expected back tomorrow. Well, dear ones all, good-night! Thus far, and no farther! Hence I turn westward again. The Greek lower orders seem far less avid and rapacious than the Southern Italians. God bless you all. I must get to another hotel, and be more to myself. Good and dear as the Putnams are and extremely helpful as they've been, it keeps me too much in company. Good-night again. Your loving father, _respective_ husband, W. J. _To Mrs. James._ ROME, _Apr. 25, 1905_. ...Strong telegraphed me yesterday from Lausanne that he ... expected to be at Cannes on the 4th of May. I was glad of this, for I had been feeling more and more as if I ought to stay here, and it makes everything square out well. This morning I went to the meeting-place of the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I gave my name, the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect, and called in poor Professor de Sanctis, the Vice President or Secretary or whatever, who treated me in the same manner, and finally got me to consent to make an address at one of the general meetings, of which there are four, in place of Sully, Flournoy, Richet, Lipps, and Brentano, who were announced but are not to come. I fancy they have been pretty unscrupulous with their program here, printing conditional futures as categorical ones. So I'm in for it again, having no power to resist flattery. I shall try to express my "Does Consciousness Exist?" in twenty minutes--and possibly in the French tongue! Strange after the deep sense of nothingness that has been besetting me the last two weeks (mere fatigue symptom) to be told that _my_ name was attracting many of the young professors to the Congress! Then I went to the Museum in the baths of Diocletian or whatever it is, off there by the R. R., then to the Capitol, and then to lunch off the Corso, at a restaurant, after buying a French book whose author says in his preface that Sully, W. J., and Bergson are his masters. And I am absolute 0 in my own home!... _Apr. 30, 1905._ 7 P.M. ...If you never had a tired husband, at least you've got one now! The _ideer_ of being in such delightful conditions and interesting surroundings, and being conscious of nothing but one's preposterous physical distress, is too ridiculous! I have just said good-bye to my circle of admirers, relatively youthful, at the hotel door, under the pretext (a truth until this morning) that I had to get ready to go to Lausanne tonight, and I taper off my activity by subsiding upon you. Yesterday till three, and the day before till five, I was writing my address, which this morning I gave--in French. I wrote it carefully and surprised myself by the ease with which I slung the Gallic accent and intonation, being excited by the occasion.[58] Janet expressed himself as _stupéfait_, from the linguistic point of view. The thing lasted 40 minutes, and was followed by a discussion which showed that the critics with one exception had wholly failed to catch the point of view; but that was quite _en régle_, so I don't care; and I have given the thing to Claparède to print in Flournoy's "Archives." The Congress was far too vast, but filled with strange and interesting creatures of all sorts, and socially _very_ nutritious to anyone who can stand sociability without distress. A fête of some sort every day--this P.M. I have just returned from a great afternoon tea given us by some "Minister" at the Borghese Palace--in the Museum. (The King, you know, has bought the splendid Borghese park and given it to the City of Rome as a democratic possession _in perpetuo_. A splendid gift.) The pictures too! Tonight there is a great banquet with speeches, to which of course I can't go. I lunched at the da Vitis,--a big table full, she very simple and nice,--and I have been having this afternoon a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of "pragmatists," Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal "Leonardo" at their own expense, and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently _really_ inspired by Schiller and myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari had assured me), and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our damned academic technics and Ph.D.-machinery and university organization prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one, are none of them _Fach-philosophers_, and few of them teachers at all. It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world. I have seen such a lot of _important_-looking faces,--probably everything in the stock in the shop-window,--and witnessed such charmingly gracious manners, that it is a lesson. The woodenness of our Anglo-Saxon social ways! I had a really splendid audience for quality this A.M. (about 200), even though they didn't understand.... _To George Santayana._ ORVIETO, _May 2, 1905_. DEAR SANTAYANA,--I came here yesterday from Rome and have been enjoying the solitude. I stayed at the exquisite Albergo de Russie, and didn't shirk the Congress--in fact they stuck me for a "general" address, to fill the vacuum left by Flournoy and Sully, who had been announced and came not (I spoke _agin_ "consciousness," but nobody understood) and I got _fearfully tired_. On the whole it was an agreeable nightmare--agreeable on account of the perfectly charming _gentillezza_ of the bloody Dagoes, the way they caress and flatter you--"il piu grand psicologo del mondo," etc., and of the elaborate provisions for general entertainment--nightmare, because of my absurd bodily fatigue. However, these things are "neither here nor there." What I really write to you for is to tell you to send (if not sent already) your "Life of Reason" to the "Revue de Philosophie," or rather to its editor, M. Peillaube, Rue des Revues 160, and to the editor of "Leonardo" (the great little Florentine philosophical journal), Sig. Giovanni Papini, 14 Borgo Albizi, Florence. The most interesting, and in fact genuinely edifying, part of my trip has been meeting this little _cénacle_, who have taken my own writings, _entre autres, au grand sérieux_, but who are carrying on their philosophical mission in anything but a technically serious way, inasmuch as "Leonardo" (of which I have hitherto only known a few odd numbers) is devoted to good and lively literary form. The sight of their belligerent young enthusiasm has given me a queer sense of the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the "Philosophical Review" and elsewhere, fed on "books of reference," and never confounding "Æsthetik" with "Erkentnisstheorie." Faugh! I shall never deal with them again--on _those_ terms! Can't you and I, who in spite of such divergence have yet so much in common in our _Weltanschauung_, start a systematic movement at Harvard against the desiccating and pedantifying process? I have been cracking you up greatly to both Peillaube and Papini, and quoted you twice in my speech, which was in French and will be published in Flournoy's "Archives de Psychologie." I hope you're enjoying the Eastern Empire to the full, and that you had some Grecian "country life." Münsterberg has been called to Koenigsberg and has refused. Better be America's ancestor than Kant's successor! Ostwald, to my great delight, is coming to us next year, not as your replacer, but in exchange with Germany for F. G. Peabody. I go now to Cannes, to meet Strong, back from his operation. Ever truly yours, Wm. James. _To Mrs. James._ CANNES, _May 13, 1905_. ...I came Sunday night, and this is Saturday. The six days have been busy ones in one sense, but have rested me very much in another. No sight-seeing fatigues, but more usual, and therefore more normal occupations.... I have written some 25 letters, long and short, to European correspondents since being here, have walked and driven with Strong, and have had philosophy hot and heavy with him almost all the time. I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. Add to it his absolute sincerity and candor and it is no wonder that he is a "growing" man. I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still. He is an admirable philosophic figure, and I am glad to say that in most things he and I are fully in accord. He gains a great deal from such talks, noting every point down afterwards, and I gain great stimulation, though in a vaguer way. I shall be glad, however, on Monday afternoon, to relax.... _To Mrs. James._ [Post-card] GENEVA, _May 17, 1905_. So far, thank Heaven, on my way towards home! A rather useful time with the superior, but sticky X----, at Marseilles, and as far as Lyons in the train, into which an hour beyond Lyons there came (till then I was alone in my compartment) a Spanish bishop, canon and "familar," an aged holy woman, sister of the bishop, a lay-brother and sister, a dog, and more baggage than I ever saw before, including a feather-bed. They spoke no French--the bishop about as much Italian as I, and the lay-sister as much of English as I of Spanish. They took out their rosaries and began mumbling their litanies forthwith, whereon I took off my hat, which seemed to touch them so, when they discovered I was a Protestant, that we all grew very affectionate and I soon felt ashamed of the way in which I had at first regarded their black and superstitious invasion of my privacy. Good, saintly people on their way to Rome. I go now to our old haunts and to the Flournoys'.... W. _To H. G. Wells._ S. S. CEDRIC, _June 6, 1905_. MY DEAR MR. WELLS,--I have just read your "Utopia" (given me by F. C. S. Schiller on the one day that I spent in Oxford on my way back to Cambridge, Mass., after a few weeks on the Continent), and "Anticipations," and "Mankind in the Making" having duly preceded, together with numerous other lighter volumes of yours, the "summation of stimuli" reaches the threshold of discharge and I can't help overflowing in a note of gratitude. You "have your faults, as who has not?" but your virtues are unparalleled and transcendent, and I believe that you will prove to have given a shove to the practical thought of the next generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences for good. All in the line of the English genius too, no wire-drawn French doctrines, and no German shop technicalities inflicted in an _unerbittlich consequent_ manner, but everywhere the sense of the full concrete, and the air of freedom playing through all the joints of your argument. You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own metaphor, don't see different levels projected on one plane. In this last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the outlines--in fact you're a trump and a jewel, and for human perception you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!--You are now an eccentric; perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic! Your Samurai chapter is magnificent, though I find myself wondering what developments in the way of partisan politics those same Samurai would develop, when it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in. _That_ I believe to be human nature's ruling passion. Live long! and keep writing; and believe me, yours admiringly and sincerely, Wm. James. _To Henry L. Higginson._ Cambridge, _July 18 [1905]_. DEAR H.,--You asked me how rich I was getting by my own (as distinguished from _your_) exertions.... I find on reaching home today a letter from Longmans, Green & Co. with a check ... which I have mailed to your house in State Street.... This ought to please you slightly; but don't reply! Instead, think of the virtues of Roosevelt, either as permanent sovereign of this great country, or as President of Harvard University. I've been having a discussion with Fanny Morse about him, which has resulted in making me his faithful henchman for life, Fanny was so violent. Think of the mighty good-will of him, of his enjoyment of his post, of his power as a preacher, of the number of things to which he gives his attention, of the safety of his second thoughts, of the increased courage he is showing, and above all of the fact that he is an open, instead of an underground leader, whom the voters can control once in four years, when he runs away, whose heart is in the right place, who is an enemy of red tape and quibbling and everything that in general the word "politician" stands for. That significance of him in the popular mind is a great national asset, and it would be a shame to let it run to waste until it has done a lot more work for us. His ambitions are not selfish--he wants to do good only! Bless him--and damn all his detractors like you and F. M.![59] Don't reply, but vote! Your affectionately Wm. James. _To T. S. Perry._ Cambridge, _Aug. 24, 1905_. DEAR THOS!--You're a _philosophe sans le savoir_ and, when you write your treatise against philosophy, you will be classed as the arch-metaphysician. Every philosopher (W. J., _e.g._) pretends that all the others are metaphysicians against whom he is simply defending the rights of common sense. As for Nietzsche, the worst break of his I recall was in a posthumous article in one of the French reviews a few months back. In his high and mighty way he was laying down the law about all the European countries. Russia, he said, is "the only one that has any possible future--and that she owes to the strength of the principle of autocracy to which she alone remains faithful," Unfortunately one can't appeal to the principle of democracy to explain Japan's recent successes. I am very glad you've done something about poor dear old John Fiske, and I should think that you would have no difficulty in swelling it up to the full "Beacon Biography" size. If you want an extra anecdote, you might tell how, when Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green, Warner and I appointed an evening to discuss the "Cosmic Philosophy," just out, J. F. went to sleep under our noses. I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind" wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker than any kitten. Don't ever let _your_ farm! Affectionately, W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Nov. 10, 1905_. DEAR MILLER,--W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did here--barring of course _der Einzige_. We are all such old stories to each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year--to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads. Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by posterity. It has no _rational_ foundation, being merely one man's way of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of Emersonianism.--declare your intuitions, though no other man share them; and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his "preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an "atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual convictions. But enough! "Phil. 9" is going well. I think I _lecture_ better than I ever did; in fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone writes out its resultant in decent English.... * * * * * The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke, in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till mid-May." _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Dec. 6, 1905_. DEAR MILLER,-- ...You seem to take radical empiricism more simply than I can. What I mean by it is the thesis that there is no fact "not actually experienced to be such." In other words, the concept of "being" or "fact" is not wider than or prior to the concept "content of experience"; and you can't talk of _experiences being_ this or that, but only of _things experienced as being_ this or that. But such a thesis would, it seems to me, if literally taken, force one to drop the notion that in point of fact one experience is _ex_ another, so long as the _ex_-ness is not itself a "content" of experience. In the matter of two minds not having the same content, it seems to me that your view commits you to an assertion _about their experiences_; and such an assertion assumes a realm in which the experiences lie, which overlaps and surrounds the "content" of them. This, it seems to me, breaks down radical empiricism, which I hate to do; and I can't yet clearly see my way out of the quandary. I am much boggled and muddled; and the total upshot with me is to see that all the hoary errors and prejudices of man in matters philosophical are based on something pretty inevitable in the structure of our thinking, and to distrust summary executions by conviction of contradiction. I suspect your execution of being too summary; but I have copied the last paragraph of the sheets (which I return with heartiest thanks) for the extraordinarily neat statement.... I dread the prospect of lecturing till mid-May, but the wine being ordered, I must drink it. I dislike lecturing more and more. Have just definitely withdrawn my candidacy for the Sorbonne job, with great internal relief, and wish I could withdraw from the whole business, and get at writing.[61] Not a line of writing possible this year--except of course occasional note-making. All the things that one is really concerned with are too nice and fine to use in lectures. You remember the definition of T. H. Greene's student: "The universe is a thick complexus of intelligible relations." Yesterday I got _my_ system similarly defined in an examination-book, by a student whom I appear to have converted to the view that "the Universe is a vague pulsating mass of next-to-next movement, always feeling its way along to a good purpose, or trying to." That is about as far as lectures can carry them. I particularly like the "trying to." I wish I could have been at your recent discussion. I am getting impatient with the awful abstract rigmarole in which our American philosophers obscure the truth. It will be fatal. It revives the palmy days of Hegelianism. It means utter relaxation of intellectual duty, and God will smite it. If there's anything he hates, it is that kind of oozy writing. I have just read Busse's book, in which I find a lot of reality by the way, but a pathetic waste of work on side issues--for against the Strong-Heymans view of things, it seems to me that he brings no solid objection whatever. Heymans's book is a wonder.[62] Good-bye, dear Miller. _Come to us_, if you can, as soon as your lectures are over. Your affectionate W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ [Post-card] Cambridge, _Dec. 9. 1905_. "My idea of Algebra," says a non-mathematically-minded student, "is that it is a sort of form of low cunning." W. J. _To Daniel Merriman._ Cambridge, _Dec. 9, 1905_. No, dear Merriman, not "e'en for thy sake." After an unblemished record of declining to give addresses, successfully maintained for four years (I have certainly declined 100 in the past twelve-month), I am not going to break down now, for Abbot Academy, and go dishonored to my grave. It is better, as the "Bhagavat-Gita" says, to lead your own life, however bad, than to lead another's, however good. Emerson teaches the same doctrine, and I live by it as bad and congenial a life as I can. If there is anything that God despises more than a man who is constantly making speeches, it is another man who is constantly accepting invitations. What must he think, when they are both rolled into one? Get thee behind me, Merriman,--I 'm sure that your saintly partner would never have sent me such a request,--and believe me, as ever, fondly yours, Wm. James. _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ EL TOVAR, GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA, _Jan. 3, 1906_. DEAR PAOLINA,--I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a good place from which to date my New Year's greeting to you. But we correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual words with the pen, the last impressions of one's day and the more permanent interest of one's life block the way for each other. I think, however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous freaks of nature, seems at first-sight smaller and more manageable than one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character, that one has no habits of association with "the likes" of it, and at first it seems a foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow nearer, and can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might become the passion of one's life--so far as "Nature" goes. The conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of "self" which is said to be indispensable to absorption in Beauty. Moreover, I have kept upon the "rim," seeing the Canyon from several points some miles apart. I meant to go down, having but this day; but they couldn't send me or any one today; and I confess that, with my precipice-disliking soul, I was relieved, though it very likely would have proved less uncomfortable than I have been told. (I resolved to go, in order to be worthy of being your correspondent.) As Chas. Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by "circumstances beyond your control" from even trying to execute them. But if ever I get here in summer, I shall go straight down and live there. I'm sure that it is indispensable. But it is vain to waste descriptive words on the wondrous apparition, with its symphonies of architecture and of color. I have just been watching its peaks blush in the setting sun, and slowly lose their fire. Night nestling in the depths. Solemn, solemn! And a unity of design that makes it seem like an individual, an animated being. Good-night, old chasm!... _To Henry James._ STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Feb. 1, 1906_. BELOVED H.,--Verily 'tis long since I have written to thee, but I have had many and mighty things to do, and lately many business letters to write, so I came not at it. Your last was your delightful reply to my remarks about your "third manner," wherein you said that you would consider your bald head dishonored if you ever came to pleasing _me_ by what you wrote, so shocking was my taste.[63] Well! only write _for_ me, and leave the question of pleasing open! I have to admit that in "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove," you have succeeded _in getting there_ after a fashion, in spite of the perversity of the method and its _longness_, which I am not the only one to deplore. But enough! let me tell you of my own fortunes! I got here (after five pestilentially close-aired days in the train, and one entrancing one off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado) on the 8th, and have now given nine lectures, to 300 enrolled students and about 150 visitors, partly colleagues. I take great pains, prepare a printed syllabus, very fully; and really feel for the first time in my life, as if I were lecturing _well_. High time, after 30 years of practice! It earns me $5000, if I can keep it up till May 27th; but apart from that, I think it is a bad way of expending energy. I ought to be writing my everlastingly postponed book, which this job again absolutely adjourns. I can't write a line of it while doing this other thing. (A propos to which, I got a telegram from Eliot this A.M., asking if I would be Harvard Professor for the first half of next year at the University of Berlin. I had no difficulty in declining that, but I probably shall not decline _Paris_, if they offer it to me year after next.) I am expecting Alice to arrive in a fortnight. I have got a very decent little second story, just enough for the two of us, or rather amply enough, sunny, good fire-place, bathroom, little kitchen, etc., on one of the three residential streets of the University land, and with a boarding-house for meals just opposite, we shall have a sort of honeymoon picnic time. And, sooth to say, Alice must need the simplification.... You've seen this wonderful spot, so I needn't describe it. It is really a miracle; and so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific civilization while it is most plastic, or for _any one_ who wants to teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine months, and _who is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the remaining three_, I can't imagine anything finer. It is Utopian. Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant until 10 o'clock A.M., then unpleasant. In short, the "simple life" with all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum--the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen--and the social insipidity. I'm glad I came, and with God's blessing I may pull through. One calendar month is over, anyway. Do you know aught of G. K. Chesterton? I've just read his "Heretics." A tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox. Wells's "Kipps" is good. Good-bye. Of course you 're breathing the fog of London while I am bathed in warmest lucency. Keep well. Your loving, W. J. _To Theodore Flournoy._ STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Feb. 9, 1906_. DEAR FLOURNOY.--Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months.... Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but more particularly Mr. Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the wedding--probably it is not yet appointed. Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As a _man_, Hodgson was splendid, a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, and _he_ is engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation--and nothing else--had begun to bore me to extinction.... To change the subject--you ought to see this extraordinary little University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and buildings, of really _beautiful_ architecture, that have been paid for out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, and _all_ the essentials. Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded centres of civilization--for the social insipidity is great here, and the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to change. Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted with imagination enough to see its proper rôle. Its geographical environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique quality all through, and get _sommités_ to come here to work and teach, by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up something very distinguished. Instead of which, they pay small sums to young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thing _might_ be Utopian; it _is_ only half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things of _some_ sort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new régime--next year they will have two good professors. I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find it hard work,[64] and only pray that I may have strength to run till June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest and wholesome. I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal: "la palme est maintenant à l'Amérique." It is true that a lot of youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all the _bad writing_ that the world has seen, I think that our American writing is getting to be the worst. X----'s ideas have unchained formlessness of expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany. I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do. I am so busy teaching that I do no writing and but little reading this year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year after, if asked, I _may_ go to Paris--but never to Berlin. We have had Ostwald, a most delightful human _Erscheinung_, as international exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system.... _To F. C. S. Schiller._ HOTEL DEL MONTE, MONTEREY, CAL., _Apr. 7, 1906_. ...What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the "Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the "Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import for life and regeneration, the _great_ perspective of the programme, and the renovating character for _all things_, of Humanism; and the outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really to _prefer_ anything), just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter. Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of every one of us (even of you, with his _Uomo-Dio_) at a single stride. And what a writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none of _them_ will see it--Taylor will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will all be drifting after _us_. It is queer to be assisting at the _éclosion_ of a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy in one--I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till June, but pray tell Wells (whose address _fehlt mir_) to make our house his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine, W. J. The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65] _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Apr. 22, 1906_. DEAREST FANNY,--Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to write, have kept postponing; and with Alice--cooking, washing dishes and doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life--it has been very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held ("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts on Earthquakes--pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter, but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an _entity_ that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, _go_ it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed--everything _down_, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco. I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she _must_ see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service. But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back. I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote me himself a good letter--won't you, by the way, send him this one as a partial answer?--and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco enjoyment has small elbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate, W. J. A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East was reëstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them during the days immediately following the disaster. _To Henry James and William James, Jr._ Cambridge, _May 9, 1906_. DEAREST BROTHER AND SON,--Your cablegram of response was duly received, and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms, hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so. We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this callousness on our part. For _all_ the anguish was yours; and in general this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles, sieges and other great calamities, the pathos and agony is in general solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is suffered most by its immediate victims, those at the _scene of action_ have no _sentimental_ suffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone, after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things vastly worse. In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it will be _you_ only who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so. Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though damp and chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the lustrous light and sky of Stanford University.... I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it is strikingly pat. _Les intellectuels_, wedged between the millionaires and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the frustrations and they can't get the salve. _My_ attainment of so much pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr. No word yet. Your ever loving, W. J. In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies." _To W. Lutoslawski._ Cambridge, _May 6, 1906_. ...Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"--a calm, firm, sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your epistles--which is already a convincing argument of the genuineness of the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices.... You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline--I never meant to suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an unbalanced mind--obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my general energy is _in Anspruch genommen_ by hard lecturing and other professional work, that then particularly what little _ascetic_ energy I have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of "tonifying" me. But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of _waking up deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used_, and thereby increasing the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the "psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the underlying _sentiment d'incomplétude_, as he calls it, or _sentiment de l'irréel_ with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals, religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.? What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately made popular by Horace Fletcher--I dare say you have heard of them. You see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it _ad oculos_, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the old-fashioned _Guru_ was becoming quite a rarity. I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man" of commerce, so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them. _You_ have indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must keep there! _My_ deeper levels seem very hard to find--I am so rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods--a dry and bony _individual_, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No matter, art is long! and _qui vivra verra_. I shall try fasting and again try breathing--discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is more tolerable.... _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _May 18, 1906_. DEAR OLD JACK C.,--Having this minute come into the possession of a new type-writer, what can I do better than express my pride in the same by writing to you?[66] I spent last night at George Dorr's and he read me several letters from you, telling me also of your visit, and of how well you seemed. For years past I have been on the point of writing to you to assure [you] of my continued love and to express my commiseration for your poor wife, who has had so long to bear the brunt of your temper--you see I have been there already and I know how one's irritability is exasperated by conditions of nervous prostration--but now I can write and congratulate you on having recovered, temper and all. (As I write, it bethinks me that in a previous letter I have made identical jokes about your temper which, I fear, will give Mrs. Chapman a very low opinion of my humoristic resources, and in sooth they are small; but we are as God makes us and must not try to be anything else, so pray condone the silliness and let it pass.) The main thing is that you seem practically to have recovered, in spite of everything; and I am heartily glad. I too am well enough for all practical purposes, but I have to go slow and not try to do too many things in a day. Simplification of life and consciousness I find to be the great thing, but a hard thing to compass when one lives in city conditions. How our dear Sarah Whitman lived in the sort of railroad station she made of her life--I confess it's a mystery to me. If I lived at a place called Barrytown, it would probably go better--don't you ever go back to New York to live! Alice and I had a jovial time at sweet little Stanford University. It was the simple life in the best sense of the term. I am glad for once to have been part of the working machine of California, and a pretty deep part too, as it afterwards turned out. The earthquake also was a memorable bit of experience, and altogether we have found it mind-enlarging and are very glad we ben there. But the whole intermediate West is awful--a sort of penal doom to have to live there; and in general the result with me of having lived 65 years in America is to make me feel as if I had at least bought the right to a certain capriciousness, and were free now to live for the remainder of my days wherever I prefer and can make my wife and children consent--it is more likely to be in rural than in urban surroundings, and in the maturer than in the _rawrer_ parts of the world. But the first thing is to get out of the treadmill of teaching, which I hate and shall resign from next year. After that, I can use my small available store of energy in writing, which is not only a much more economical way of working it, but more satisfactory in point of quality, and more lucrative as well. Now, J. C., when are you going to get at writing again? The world is hungry for your wares. No one touches certain deep notes of moral truth as you do, and your humor is _köstlich_ and _impayable_. You ought to join the band of "pragmatistic" or "humanistic" philosophers. I almost fear that Barrytown may not yet have begun to be disturbed by the rumor of their achievements, the which are of the greatest, and seriously I du think that the world of thought is on the eve of a renovation no less important than that contributed by Locke. The leaders of the new movement are Dewey, Schiller of Oxford, in a sense Bergson of Paris, a young Florentine named Papini, and last and least worthy, W. J. H. G. Wells ought to be counted in, and if I mistake not G. K. Chesterton as well.[67] I hope you know and love the last-named writer, who seems to me a great teller of the truth. His systematic preference for contradictions and paradoxical forms of statement seems to me a mannerism somewhat to be regretted in so wealthy a mind; but that is a blemish from which some of our very greatest intellects are not altogether free--the philosopher of Barrytown himself being not wholly exempt. Join us, O Jack, and in the historic and perspective sense your fame will be secure. All future Histories of Philosophy will print your name. But although my love for you is not exhausted, my type-writing energy is. It communicates stiffness and cramps, both to the body and the mind. Nevertheless I think I have been doing pretty well for a first attempt, don't you? If you return me a good long letter telling me more particularly about the process of your recovery, I will write again, even if I have to take a pen to do it, and in any case I will do it much better than this time. Believe me, dear old J. C., with hearty affection and delight at your recovery--all these months I have been on the brink of writing to find out how you were--and with very best regards to your wife, whom some day I wish we may be permitted to know better. Yours very truly, Wm. James. Everyone dead! Hodgson, Shaler, James Peirce this winter--to go no further afield! _Resserrons les rangs!_ _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _Sept. 10, 1906_. DEAREST H.,--I got back from the Adirondacks, where I had spent a fortnight, the night before last, and in three or four hours Alice, Aleck and I will be spinning towards Chocorua, it being now five A.M. Elly [Temple] Hunter will join us, with Grenville, in a few days; but for the most part, thank Heaven, we shall be alone till the end of the month. I found two letters from you awaiting me, and two from Bill. They all breathed a spirit of happiness, and brought a waft of the beautiful European summer with them. It has been a beautiful summer here too; and now, sad to say, it is counting the last beads of its chaplet of hot days out--the hot days which are really the absolutely friendly ones to man--you wish they would get cooler when you have them, and when they are departed, you wish you could have their exquisite gentleness again. I have just been reading in the volume by Richard Jefferies called the "Life of the Fields" a wonderful rhapsody, "The Pageant of Summer." It needs to be read twice over and very attentively, being nothing but an enumeration of all the details visible in the corner of an old field with a hedge and ditch. But rightly taken in, it is probably the highest flight of human genius in the direction of nature-worship. I don't see why it should not count as an immortal thing. You missed it, when here, in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness!... This is definitely my last year of lecturing, but I wish it were my first of non-lecturing. Simplification of the field of duties I find more and more to be the _summum bonum_ for me; and I live in apprehension lest the Avenger should cut me off before I get my message out. Not that the message is particularly needed by the human race, which can live along perfectly well without any one philosopher; but objectively I hate to leave the volumes I have already published without their logical complement. It is an esthetic tragedy to have a bridge begun, and stopped in the middle of an arch. But I hear Alice stirring upstairs, so I must go up and finish packing. I hope that you and W. J., Jr., will again form a harmonious combination. I hope also that he will stop painting for a time. He will do all the better, when he gets home, for having had a fallow interval. Good-bye! and my blessing upon both of you. Your ever loving, W. J. _To H. G. Wells._ CHOCORUA, _Sept. 11, 1906_. DEAR MR. WELLS,--I've read your "Two Studies in Disappointment" in "Harper's Weekly," and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. _Rem acu tetegisti!_ Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is _the_ sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization. How you hit upon it so neatly and singled it out so truly (and talked of it so tactfully!) God only knows: He evidently created you to do such things! I never heard of the MacQueen case before, but I've known of plenty of others. When the ordinary American hears of them, instead of the idealist within him beginning to "see red" with the higher indignation, instead of the spirit of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's probably right enough"; "Scoundrelly, as you say," but understandable, "from the point of view of parties interested"--but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That--with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success--is our national disease. Hit it hard! Your book _must_ have a great effect. Do you remember the glorious remarks about success in Chesterton's "Heretics"? You will undoubtedly have written _the_ medicinal book about America. And what good humor! and what tact! Sincerely yours, Wm. James. _To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._ CHOCORUA, _Sept. 13, 1906_. DEAR THEODORA,--Here we are in this sweet delicate little place, after a pretty agitated summer, and the quiet seems very nice. Likewise the stillness. I have thought often of you, and _almost_ written; but there never seemed exactly to be time or place for it, so I let the sally of the heart to-you-ward suffice. A week ago, I spent a night with H. L. Higginson, whom I found all alone at his house by the Lake, and he told me your improvement had been continuous and great, which I heartily hope has really been the case. I don't see why it should not have been the case, under such delightful conditions. What good things friends are! And what better thing than lend it, can one do with one's house? I was struck by Henry Higginson's high level of mental tension, so to call it, which made him talk, incessantly and passionately about one subject after another, never running dry, and reminding me more of myself when I was twenty years old. It isn't so much a man's eminence of elementary faculties that pulls him through. They may be rare, and he do nothing. It is the steam pressure to the square inch behind that moves the machine. The amount of that is what makes the great difference between us. Henry has it high. Previous to seeing him I had spent ten days in beautiful Keene Valley, dividing them between the two ends. The St. Hubert's end is, I verily believe, one of the most beautiful things in this beautiful world--too dissimilar to anything in Europe to be compared therewith, and consequently able to stand on its merits all alone. But the great [forest] fire of four years ago came to the very edge of wiping it out! And any year it may go. I also had a delightful week all alone on the Maine Coast, among the islands. Back here, one is oppressed by sadness at the amount of work waiting to be done on the place and no one to be hired to do it. The entire meaning and essence of "land" is something to be worked over--even if it be only a wood-lot, it must be kept trimmed and cleaned. And for one who _can_ work and who _likes_ work with his arms and hands, there is nothing so delightful as a piece of land to work over--it responds to every hour you give it, and smiles with the "improvement" year by year. I neither can work now, nor do I like it, so an irremediable bad conscience afflicts my ownership of this place. With Cambridge as headquarters for August, and a little lot of land there, I think I could almost be ready to give up this place, and trust to the luck of hotels, and other opportunities of rustication without responsibility. But perhaps we can get this place [taken care of?] some day! I don't know how much you read. I've taken great pleasure this summer in Bielshowski's "Life of Goethe" (a wonderful piece of art) and in Birukoff's "Life of Tolstoy." Alice is very well and happy in the stillness here. Elly Hunter is coming this evening, tomorrow the Merrimans for a day, and then Mrs. Hodder till the end of the month. Faithful love from both of us, dear Theodora. Your affectionate W. J. _To his Daughter._ Cambridge, _Jan. 20, 1907_, 6.15 P.M. SWEET PEGLEIN,--Just before tea! and your Grandam, Mar, and I going to hear the Revd. Percy Grant in the College chapel just after. We are getting to be great church-goers. 'T will have to be Crothers next. He, sweet man, is staying with the Brookses. After him, the Christian Science Church, and after that the deluge! I have spent all day preparing next Tuesday's lecture, which is my last before a class in Harvard University, so help me God amen! I am almost _afraid_ at so much freedom. Three quarters of an hour ago Aleck and I went for a walk in Somerville; warm, young moon, bare trees, clearing in the west, stars out, old-fashioned streets, not sordid--a beautiful walk. Last night to Bernard Shaw's ex-_quis_-ite play of "Cæsar and Cleopatra"--exquisitely acted too, by F. Robertson and Maxine Elliot's sister Gert. Your Mar will have told you that, after these weeks of persistent labor, culminating in New York, I am going to take sanctuary on Saturday the 2nd of Feb. in your arms at Bryn Mawr. I do not want, wish, or desire to "talk" to the crowd, but your mother pushing so, if you and the philosophy club also pull, I mean pull _hard_, Jimmy[68] will try to articulate something not too technical. But it will have to be, if ever, on that Saturday night. It will also have to be very short; and the less of a "reception," the better, after it. Your two last letters were tiptop. I never seen such _growth_! I go to N. Y., to be at the Harvard Club, on Monday the 28th. Kühnemann left yesterday. A most dear man. Your loving DAD. _To Henry James and William James, Jr._ Cambridge, _Feb. 14, 1907_. DEAR BROTHER AND SON,--I dare say that you will be together in Paris when you get this, but I address it to Lamb House all the same. You twain are more "blessed" than I, in the way of correspondence this winter, for you give more than you receive, Bill's letters being as remarkable for wit and humor as Henry's are for copiousness, considering that the market value of what he either writes or types is so many shillings a word. When _I_ write other things, I find it almost impossible to write letters. I've been at it _stiddy_, however, for three days, since my return from New York, finding, as I did, a great stack of correspondence to attend to. The first impression of New York, if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for twenty years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions. But this time, installed as I was at the Harvard Club (44th St.) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated _mit_, and found it simply magnificent. I'm surprised at you, Henry, not having been more enthusiastic, but perhaps that superbly powerful and beautiful subway was not opened when you were there. It is an _entirely_ new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the _lightness_ withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coördination is indefinitely future, give a kind of _drumming background_ of life that I never felt before. I'm sure that once _in_ that movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid. I observe that your book,--"The American Scene,"--dear H., is just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New York. On my last night, I dined with Norman Hapgood, along with men who were successfully and happily in the vibration. H. and his most winning-faced young partner, Collier, Jerome, Peter Dunne, F. M. Colby, and Mark Twain. (The latter, poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he's a dear little genius all the same.) I got such an impression of easy efficiency in the midst of their bewildering conditions of speed and complexity of adjustment. Jerome, particularly, with the world's eyes on his court-room, in the very crux of the Thaw trial, as if he had nothing serious to do. Balzac ought to come to life again. His Rastignac imagination sketched the possibility of it long ago. I lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted, out, every day of my stay, vibrated between 44th St., seldom going lower, and 149th, with Columbia University at 116th as my chief relay station, the magnificent space-devouring Subway roaring me back and forth, lecturing to a thousand daily,[69] and having four separate dinners at the Columbia Faculty Club, where colleagues severally compassed me about, many of them being old students of mine, wagged their tongues at me and made me explain.[70] It was certainly the high tide of my existence, so far as _energizing_ and being "recognized" were concerned, but I took it all very "easy" and am hardly a bit tired. Total abstinence from every stimulant whatever is the one condition of living at a rapid pace. I am now going whack at the writing of the rest of the lectures, which will be more original and (I believe) important than my previous works.... _To Moorfield Storey._ Cambridge, _Feb._ 21, 1907. DEAR MOORFIELD,--Your letter of three weeks ago has inadvertently lain unnoticed--not because it didn't do me good, but because I went to New York for a fortnight, and since coming home have been too druv to pay any tributes to friendship. I haven't got many letters either of condolence or congratulation on my retirement,--which, by the way, doesn't take place till the end of the year,--the papers have railroaded me out too soon.[71] But I confess that the thought is sweet to me of being able to hear the College bell ring without any tendency to "move" in consequence, and of seeing the last Thursday in September go by, and remaining in the country careless of what becomes of its youth. It's the _harness_ and the _hours_ that are so galling! I expect to shed truths in dazzling profusion on the world for many years. As for you, retire too! Let you, Eliot, Roosevelt and me, first relax; then take to landscape painting, which has a very soothing effect; then write out all the truths which a long life of intimacy with mankind has recommended to each of us as most useful. I think we can use the ebb tide of our energies best in that way. I'm sure that _your_ contributions would be the most useful of all. Affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. _To Theodore Flournoy._ Cambridge, _Mar._ 26, 1907. DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really _happy_ for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves--you write about _me_. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about _himself_, when you want to talk about _yourself_." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy with _no_ humbug in it, and I am certain that it is _your_ philosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"? That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the real _centre de ralliment_ of the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the youthful and _empanaché_ Papini who has best put himself at the centre of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller) has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book, however, to the memory of J. S. Mill. I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72] etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other. My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting that it will make a real impression. Münsterberg, who hitherto has been rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever wrote, Kant having already said all that I say. I regard this as a very good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already arrived: _1st_: absurd! _2nd_: trivial! _3rd_: _we_ discovered it! I don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier? But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A good _coup de collier_ all round, and I verily believe that a new philosophic movement will begin.... I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The _1st_ function is the essential one, officially considered. The _2nd_ is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only _meant_ to write a line! Love to you all from W. J. _To Charles A. Strong._ Cambridge, _Apr._ 9, 1907. DEAR STRONG,--Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M., just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there; if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault, I hope it may be at the _Russie_, that most delightful of hotels. I am overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief _in re religionis_. Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose they are,--this is the second heavy one I remember,--touch me, but not in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent" God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But, having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal that _feels as if it_ were also actual (I have no such commerce--I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not higher and bigger? Why _may_ we not be in the universe as our dogs and cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief? What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in God do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought to aim at the _transformation of reality_--no less! When you defer to what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up, or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority _at large_ is for _method_--and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great harm in the God I patronize--the poor thing is so largely an ideal possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, or _shall_ take delight, in any efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by "freedom,"--but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and the other on the "making of reality"?... _To F. C. S. Schiller._ Cambridge, _Apr._ 19, 1907. DEAR SCHILLER,--Two letters and a card from you within ten days is pretty good. I have been in New York for a week, so haven't written as promptly as I should have done. All right for the Gilbert Murrays! We shall be glad to see them. Too late for "humanism" in my book--all in type! I dislike "pragmatism," but it seems to have the _international_ right of way at present. Let's both go ahead--God will know his own! When your book first came I lent it to my student Kallen (who was writing a thesis on the subject), thereby losing it for three weeks. Then the grippe, and my own proofs followed, along with much other business, so that I've only read about a quarter of it even now. The essays on Freedom and the Making of Reality seem to be written with my own heart's blood--it's startling that two people should be found to think so exactly alike. A great argument for the truth of what they say, too! I find that my own chapter on Truth printed in the J. of P. already,[73] convinces no one as yet, not even my most _gleichgesinnten_ cronies. It will have to be worked in by much future labor, for I _know_ that I see all round the subject and they don't, and I think that the theory of truth is the key to all the rest of our positions. You ask what I am going to "reply" to Bradley. But why need one reply to everything and everybody? B.'s article is constructive rather than polemic, is evidently sincere, softens much of his old outline, is difficult to read, and ought, I should think, to be left to its own destiny. How sweetly, by the way, he feels towards me as compared with you! All because you have been too bumptious. I confess I think that your _gaudium certaminis_ injures your influence. _We_'ve got a thing big enough to set forth now affirmatively, and I think that readers generally hate _minute_ polemics and recriminations. All polemic of ours should, I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally. Inborn rationalists and inborn pragmatists will never convert each other. We shall always look on them as spectral and they on us as trashy--irredeemably both! As far as the rising generation goes, why not simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view quietly will displace the other. Here again "God will know his own." False views don't need much direct refutation--they get superseded, and I feel absolutely certain of the supersessive power of pragmato-humanism, if persuasively enough set forth.... The world is wide enough to harbor various ways of thinking, and the present Bradley's units of mental operation are so diverse from ours that the labor of reckoning over from one set of terms to the other doesn't bring reward enough to pay for it. Of course his way of treating "truth" as an entity trying all the while to identify herself with reality, while reality is equally trying to identify herself with the more ideal entity truth, isn't _false_. It's one way, very remote and allegorical, of stating the facts, and it "agrees" with a good deal of reality, but it has so little pragmatic value that its tottering form can be left for time to deal with. The good it does him is small, for it leaves him in this queer, surly, grumbling state about the best that can be done by it for philosophy. His great vice seems to me his perversity in logical activities, his bad reasonings. I vote to go on, from now on, not trying to keep account of the relations of his with our system. He can't be influencing disciples, being himself nowadays so difficult. And once for all, there _will_ be minds who _cannot_ _help_ regarding our growing universe as _sheer trash_, metaphysically considered. Yours ever, W. J. The next letter is addressed to an active promoter of reform in the treatment of the insane, the author of "A Mind that Found Itself." The Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene have already performed so great a public service, that anyone may now see that in 1907 the time had come to employ such instrumentalities in improving the care of the insane. But when Mr. Beers, just out of an asylum himself, appeared with the manuscript of his own story in his hands, it was not so clear that these agencies were needed, nor yet evident to anyone that he was a person who could bring about their organization. James's own opinion as to the treatment of the insane is not in the least overstated in the following letter. He recognized the genuineness of Mr. Beers's personal experience and its value for propaganda, and he immediately helped to get it published. From his first acquaintance with Mr. Beers, he gave time, counsel, and money to further the organization of the Mental Hygiene Committee; and he even departed, in its interest, from his fixed policy of "keeping out of Committees and Societies." He lived long enough to know that the movement had begun to gather momentum; and he drew great satisfaction from the knowledge. _To Clifford W. Beers._ Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_. DEAR MR. BEERS,--You ask for my opinion as to the advisability and feasibility of a National Society, such as you propose, for the improvement of conditions among the insane. I have never ceased to believe that such improvement is one of the most "crying" needs of civilization; and the functions of such a Society seem to me to be well drawn up by you. Your plea for its being founded before your book appears is well grounded, you being an author who naturally would like to cast seed upon a ground already prepared for it to germinate practically without delay. I have to confess to being myself a very impractical man, with no experience whatever in the details, difficulties, etc., of philanthropic or charity organization, so my opinion as to the _feasibility_ of your plan is worth nothing, and is undecided. Of course the first consideration is to get your money, the second, your Secretary and Trustees. All that _I_ wish to bear witness to is the great need of a National Society such as you describe, or failing that, of a State Society somewhere that might serve as a model in other States. Nowhere is there massed together as much suffering as in the asylums. Nowhere is there so much sodden routine, and fatalistic insensibility in those who have to treat it. Nowhere is an ideal treatment more costly. The officials in charge grow resigned to the conditions under which they have to labor. They cannot plead their cause as an auxiliary organization can plead it for them. Public opinion is too glad to remain ignorant. As mediator between officials, patients, and the public conscience, a society such as you sketch is absolutely required, and the sooner it gets under way the better.[74] Sincerely yours, WILLIAM JAMES. At the date of the next letter William James, Jr., was studying painting in Paris. _To his Son William._ Cambridge, _Apr. 24, 1907_. DEAREST BILL,--I haven't written to you for ages, yet you keep showering the most masterly and charming epistles upon all of us in turn, including the fair Rosamund.[75] Be sure they are appreciated! Your Ma and I dined last night at Ellen and Loulie Hooper's to meet Rosalind Huidekoper and her swain. Loulie had heard from Bancel [La Farge] of your getting a "mention"--if for the model, I'm not surprised; if for the composition, I'm immensely pleased. Of course you'll tell us of it! We've had a very raw cold April, and today it's blowing great guns from all quarters of the sky, preparatory to clearing from the N.W., I think. We are rooting up the entire lawn to a depth of 18 inches to try to regenerate it. Four diggers and two carts have been at it for a week, with your mother, bareheaded and cloaked, and ruddy-cheeked, sticking to them like a burr. She doesn't handle pick or shovel, but she stands there all day long in a way it would do your heart good to see; and so democratic and hearty withal that I'm sure they like it, though working under such a great taskmaster's eye deprives them of those intervals of stolen leisure so dear to "workers" of every description. She makes it up to them by inviting them to an afternoon tea daily, with piles of cake and doughnuts. I fancy they like her well. We've let Chocorua to the Goldmarks. Aleck took his April recess along with his schoolmate Henderson and Gerald Thayer, partly on the summit, partly around the base, of Monadnock. The weather was fiercely wintry, and your mother and I said "poor blind little Aleck--he's got to learn thru experience." [She said "through"!] He came back happier and more exultant than I've ever seen him, and six months older morally and intellectually for the week with Gerald and Abbott Thayer. A great step forward. They burglarized the Thayer house, and were tracked and arrested by the posse, and had a paragraph in the Boston "Globe" about the robbery. As the thing involved an ascent of Monadnock after dark, with their packs, in deep snow, a day and a night there in snowstorm, a 16-mile walk and out of bed till 2 A.M.. the night of the burglary, a "lying low" indoors all the next day at the Hendersons' empty house, three in a bed and the police waking them at dawn, I ventured to suggest a doubt as to whether the Thayer household were the greatest victims of the illustrious practical joke. "What," cries Aleck, starting to his feet, "nine men with revolvers and guns around your bed, and a revolver pointed close to your ear as you wake--don't you call that a success, I should like to know?" The Tom Sawyer phase of evolution is immortal! Gerald, who is staying with us now, is really a splendid fellow. I'm so glad he's taken to Aleck, who now is aflame with plans for being an artist. I wish he might--it would certainly suit his temperament better than "business." There 's the lunch bell. I have got my "Pragmatism" proofs all corrected. The most important thing I've written yet, and bound, I am sure, to stir up a lot of attention. But I'm dog-tired; and, in order to escape the social engagements that at this time of year grow more frequent than ever, I'm going off on Friday (this is Wednesday) to the country somewhere for ten days. If only there might be warm weather! We've just backed out from a dinner to William Leonard Darwin and his wife, and the Geo. Hodgeses, etc. W. T. Stead spent three hours here on Sunday and lectured in the Union on Monday--a splendid fellow whom I could get along with after a fashion. Let no one run him down to you. I've been to New York to the Peace Congress. Interesting but tiresome. Mary Salter is with us. Margaret and Rosamund just arrived at 107. No news else! Yours, W. J. _To Henry James._ SALISBURY, CONN., _May 4, 1907_. DEAREST H.-- ...I've been so overwhelmed with work, and the mountain of the _Unread_ has piled up so, that only in these days here have I really been able to settle down to your "American Scene," which in its peculiar way seems to me _supremely great_. You know how opposed your whole "third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you _do_ it, that's the queerness! And the complication of innuendo and associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it does so _build out_ the matter for the reader that the result is to solidify, by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from which _he_ has to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like a corporeal body; so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in this gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ into something vastly bigger and more substantial. But it's the rummest method for one to employ systematically as you do nowadays; and you employ it at your peril. In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say it _out_, for God's sake," they cry, "and have done with it." And so I say now, give us _one_ thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you _can_ still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the "curiosity of literature" which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the _core_ of literature is solid. Give it to us _once_ again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum. For God's sake don't _answer_ these remarks, which (as Uncle Howard used to say of Father's writings) are but the peristaltic belchings of my own crabbed organism. For one thing, your account of America is largely one of its omissions, silences, vacancies. You work them up like solids, for those readers who already germinally perceive them (to others you are _totally_ incomprehensible). I said to myself over and over in reading: "How much greater the triumph, if instead of dwelling thus only upon America's vacuities, he could make positive suggestion of what in 'Europe' or Asia may exist to fill them." That would be nutritious to so many American readers whose souls are only too ready to leap to suggestion, but who are now too inexperienced to know what is meant by the contrast-effect from which alone your book is written. If you could supply the background which is the foil, in terms more full and positive! At present it is supplied only by the abstract geographic term "Europe." But of course anything of that kind is excessively difficult; and you will probably say that you _are_ supplying it all along by your novels. Well, the verve and animal spirits with which you can keep your method going, first on one place then on another, through all those tightly printed pages is something marvelous; and there are pages surely doomed to be immortal, those on the "drummers," _e.g._, at the beginning of "Florida." They are in the best sense Rabelaisian. But a truce, a truce! I had no idea, when I sat down, of pouring such a bath of my own subjectivity over you. Forgive! forgive! and don't reply, don't at any rate in the sense of defending yourself, but only in that of attacking _me_, if you feel so minded. I have just finished the proofs of a little book called "Pragmatism" which even you _may_ enjoy reading. It is a very "sincere" and, from the point of view of ordinary philosophy-professorial manners, a very unconventional utterance, not particularly original at any one point, yet, in the midst of the literature of the way of thinking which it represents, with just that amount of squeak or shrillness in the voice that enables one book to _tell_, when others don't, to supersede its brethren, and be treated later as "representative." I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as "epoch-making," for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever--I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation. You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my "professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being a walking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at liberty to be a _reality_, and the comfort is unspeakable--literally unspeakable, to be my own man, after 35 years of being owned by others. I can now live for truth pure and simple, instead of for truth accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others.... Your affectionate W. J. This letter appears never to have been answered, although Henry James wrote on May 31, 1907: "You shall have, after a little more patience, a reply to your so rich and luminous reflections on my book--a reply almost as interesting as, and far more illuminating than, your letter itself." _To F. C. S. Schiller._ Cambridge, _May 18, 1907_. ...One word about the said proof [of your article]. It convinces me that you ought to be an academic personage, a "professor." For thirty-five years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being one, the pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn't possibly imagine and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. I wake up every morning with it. What! not to have to accommodate myself to this mass of alien and recalcitrant humanity, not to think under resistance, not to have to square myself with others at every step I make--hurrah! it is too good to be true. To be alone with truth and God! _Es ist nicht zu glauben!_ What a future! What a vision of ease! But here you are loving it and courting it unnecessarily. You're fit to continue a professor in all your successive reincarnations, with never a release. It was so easy to let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone. So few people would find these last statements of his seductive enough to build them into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the operation, chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his corners, stop him and cross-reference him and counter on him, as if required to do so by your office. It makes very difficult reading, it obliges one to re-read Bradley, and I don't believe there are three persons living who will take it in with the pains required to estimate its value. B. himself will very likely not read it with any care. It is subtle and clear, like everything you write, but it is too minute. And where a few broad comments would have sufficed, it is too complex, and too much like a criminal conviction in tone and temper. Leave him in his _dunklem Drange_--he is drifting in the right direction evidently, and when a certain amount of positive construction on our side has been added, he will say that that was what he had meant all along--and the world will be the better for containing so much difficult polemic reading the less. I admit that your remarks are penetrating, and let air into the joints of the subject; but I respectfully submit that they are not _called for_ in the interests of the final triumph of truth. That will come by the way of displacement of error, quite effortlessly. I can't help suspecting that you unduly magnify the influence of Bradleyan Absolutism on the undergraduate mind. Taylor is the only fruit so far--at least within my purview. One practical point: I don't quite like your first paragraph, and wonder if it be too late to have the references to me at least expunged. I can't recognize the truth of the ten-years' change of opinion about my "Will to Believe." I don't find anyone--not even my dearest friends, as Miller and Strong--one whit persuaded. Taylor's and Hobhouse's attacks are of recent date, etc. Moreover, the reference to Bradley's relation to me in this article is too ironical not to seem a little "nasty" to some readers; therefore out with it, if it be not too late. See how different our methods are! All that Humanism needs now is to make applications of itself to special problems. Get a school of youngsters at work. Refutations of error should be left to the rationalists alone. They are a stock function of that school.... I'm fearfully _tired_, but expect the summer to get me right again. Affectionately thine, W. J. XVI 1907-1909 _The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report_ The story of the remaining years is written so fully in the letters themselves as to require little explanation. Angina pectoris and such minor ailments as are only too likely to afflict a man of sixty-five years and impaired constitution interrupted the progress of reading and writing more and more. Physical exertion, particularly that involved in talking long to many people, now brought on pain and difficulty in breathing. But James still carried himself erect, still walked with a light step, and until a few weeks before his death wore the appearance of a much younger and stronger man than he really was. None but those near to him realized how often he was in discomfort or pain, or how constantly he was using himself to the limit of his endurance. He bore his ills without complaint and ordinarily without mention; although he finally made up his mind to try to discourage the appeals and requests of all sorts that still harassed him, by proclaiming the fact that he was an invalid. As his power of work became more and more reduced, frustrations became harder to bear, and the sense that they were unavoidable oppressed him. When an invitation to deliver a course of lectures on the Hibbert Foundation at Manchester College, Oxford, arrived, he was torn between an impulse to clutch at this engagement as a means of hastening the writing-out of certain material that was in his mind, and the fear, only too reasonable, that the obligation to have the lectures ready by a certain date would strain him to the snapping point. After some hesitation he agreed, however, and the lectures were, ultimately, prepared and delivered successfully. In proportion as the number of hours a day that he could spend on literary work and professional reading decreased, James's general reading increased again. He began for the first time to browse in military biographies, and commenced to collect material for a study which he sometimes spoke of as a "Psychology of Jingoism," sometimes as a "Varieties of Military Experience." What such a work would have been, had he ever completed it, it is impossible to tell. It was never more than a rather vague project, turned to occasionally as a diversion. But it is safe to reckon that two remarkable papers--the "Energies of Men" (written in 1906) and the "Moral Equivalent of War" (written in 1909)--would have appeared to be related to this study. That it would not have been a utopian flight in the direction of pacifism need hardly be said. However he might have described it, James was not disposed to underestimate the "fighting instinct." He saw it as a persistent and highly irritable force, underlying the society of all the dominant races; and he advocated international courts, reduction of armaments, and any other measures that might prevent appeals to the war-waging passion as commendable devices for getting along without arousing it. "The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise.... All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.... In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting, we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built--unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood."[76] Any utterances about war, arbitration, and disarmament, are now likely to have their original meaning distorted by reason of what may justly be called the present fevered state of public opinion on such questions. It should be clear that the foregoing sentences were not directed to any particular question of domestic or foreign policy. They were part of a broad picture of the fighting instinct, and led up to a suggestion for diverting it into non-destructive channels. As to particular instances, circumstances were always to be reckoned with. James believed in organizing and strengthening the machinery of arbitration, but did not think that the day for universal arbitration had yet come. He saw a danger in military establishments, went so far--in the presence of the "jingoism" aroused by Cleveland's Venezuela message--as to urge opposition to any increase of the American army and navy, encouraged peace-societies, and was willing to challenge attention by calling himself a pacifist.[77] "The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not presume to interfere by violence with ours."[78] Tolerance--social, religious, and political--was fundamental in his scheme of belief; but he took pains to make a proviso, and drew the line at tolerating interference or oppression. Where he recognized a military danger, there he would have had matters so governed as to meet it, not evade it. Writing of the British garrison in Halifax in 1897, he said: "By Jove, if England should ever be licked by a Continental army, it would only be Divine justice upon her for keeping up the Tommy Atkins recruiting system when the others have compulsory service." * * * * * In the case of one undertaking, which was much too troublesome to be reckoned as a diversion, he let himself be drawn away from his metaphysical work. He had taken no active part in the work of the Society for Psychical Research since 1896. In December, 1905, Richard Hodgson, the secretary of the American Branch, had died suddenly, and almost immediately thereafter Mrs. Piper, the medium whose trances Hodgson had spent years in studying, had purported to give communications from Hodgson's departed spirit. In 1909 James made a report to the S. P. R. on "Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control." The full report will be found in its Proceedings for 19O9,[79] and the concluding pages, in which James stated, more analytically than elsewhere, the hypotheses which the phenomena suggested to him, have been reprinted in the volume of "Collected Essays and Reviews." At the same time he wrote out a more popular statement, in a paper which will be found in "Memories and Studies." As to his final opinion of the spirit-theory, the following letter, given somewhat out of its chronological place, states what was still James's opinion in 1910. _To Charles Lewis Slattery._ Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_. DEAR MR. SLATTERY,--My state of mind is this: Mrs. Piper has supernormal knowledge in her trances; but whether it comes from "tapping the minds" of living people, or from some common cosmic reservoir of memories, or from surviving "spirits" of the departed, is a question impossible for _me_ to answer just now to my own satisfaction. The spirit-theory is undoubtedly not only the most natural, but the simplest, and I have great respect for Hodgson's and Hyslop's arguments when they adopt it. At the same time the electric current called _belief_ has not yet closed in my mind. Whatever the explanation be, trance-mediumship is an excessively complex phenomenon, in which many concurrent factors are engaged. That is why interpretation is so hard. Make any use, public or private, that you like of this. In great haste, yours, Wm. James. The next letter should be understood as referring to the abandonment of an excursion to Lake Champlain with Henry L. Higginson. The celebration alluded to in the last part of the letter had been arranged by the Cambridge Historical Society in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Louis Agassiz. _To Henry L. Higginson._ CHOCORUA, N. H., _circa, June 1, 1907_. DEAR HENRY,--On getting your resignation by telephone, I came straight up here instead, without having time to write you my acceptance as I meant to; and now comes your note of the fourth, before I have done so. I am exceedingly sorry, my dear old boy, that it is the doctor's advice that has made you fear to go. I hope the liability to relapse will soon fade out and leave you free again; for say what they will of _Alters Schwäche_ and resignation to decay, and _entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren_, it means only sour grapes, and the insides of one always want to be doing the free and active things. However, a river can still be lively in a shrunken bed, and we must not pay too much attention to the difference of level. If you should summon me again this summer, I can probably respond. I shall be here for a fortnight, then back to Cambridge again for a short time. I thought the Agassiz celebration went off very nicely indeed, didn't you?--John Gray's part in it being of course the best. X---- was heavy, but respectable, and the heavy respectable _ought_ to be one ingredient in anything of the kind. But how well Shaler would have done that part of the job had he been there! Love to both of you! W. J. _To W. Cameron Forbes._ CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1907_. DEAR CAMERON FORBES,--Your letter from Baguio of the 18th of April touches me by its genuine friendliness, and is a tremendous temptation. Why am I not ten years younger? Even now I hesitate to say no, and the only reason why I don't say yes, with a roar, is that certain rather serious drawbacks in the way of health of late seem to make me unfit for the various activities which such a visit ought to carry in its train. I am afraid my program from now onwards ought to be sedentary. I ought to be getting out a book next winter. Last winter I could hardly do any walking, owing to a trouble with my heart. Does your invitation mean to include my wife? And have you a good crematory so that she might bring home my ashes in case of need? I think if you had me on the spot you would find me a less impractical kind of an anti-imperialist than you have supposed me to be. I think that the manner in which the McKinley administration railroaded the country into its policy of conquest was abominable, and the way the country pucked up its ancient soul at the first touch of temptation, and followed, was sickening. But with the establishment of the civil commission McKinley did what he could to redeem things and now what the Islands want is CONTINUITY OF ADMINISTRATION to form new habits that may to some degree be hoped to last when we, as controllers, are gone. WHEN? that is the question. And much difference of opinion may be fair as to the answer. That we can't stay forever seems to follow from the fact that the educated Philippinos differ from all previous colonials in having been inoculated before our occupation with the ideas of the French Revolution; and that is a virus to which history shows as yet no anti-toxine. As I am at present influenced, I think that the U. S. ought to solemnly proclaim a date for our going (or at least for a plebiscitum as to whether we should go) and stand by all the risks. _Some_ date, rather than indefinitely drift. And shape the whole interval towards securing things in view of the change. As to this, I may be wrong, and am always willing to be convinced. I wish I could go, and see you all at work. Heaven knows I admire the spirit with which you are animated--a new thing in colonial work. It must have been a great pleasure to you to see so many of the family at once. I have seen none of them since their return, but hope to do so ere the summer speeds. The only dark spot was poor F----'s death. Believe me, with affectionate regards, yours truly, Wm. James. I am ordering a little book of mine, just out, to be sent to you. Some one of your circle may find entertainment in it. _To F. C. S. Schiller._ [Post-card] CHOCORUA, _June_ 13, 1907. Yours of the 27th ult. received and highly appreciated. I'm glad you relish my book so well. You go on playing the Boreas and I shedding the sunbeams, and between us we'll get the cloak off the philosophic traveler! But _have_ you read Bergson's new book?[80]It seems to me that nothing is important in comparison with that divine apparition. All _our_ positions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and the beast intellectualism killed absolutely _dead_! The whole flowed round by a style incomparable as it seems to me. Read it, and digest it if you can. Much of it I can't yet assimilate. [_No signature._] _To Henri Bergson._ CHOCORUA, _June 13, 1907_. O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy, making, if I mistake not, an entirely new era in respect of matter, but unlike the works of genius of the "transcendentalist" movement (which are so obscurely and abominably and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form. You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing "Madame Bovary," such a flavor of persistent _euphony_, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. Then the aptness of your illustrations, that never scratch or stand out at right angles, but invariably simplify the thought and help to pour it along! Oh, indeed you are a magician! And if your next book proves to be as great an advance on this one as this is on its two predecessors, your name will surely go down as one of the great creative names in philosophy. There! have I praised you enough? What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is _praise_--although the philosophers generally call it "recognition"! If you want still more praise, let me know, and I will send it, for my features have been on a broad smile from the first page to the last, at the chain of felicities that never stopped. I feel rejuvenated. As to the content of it, I am not in a mood at present to make any definite reaction. There is so much that is absolutely new that it will take a long time for your contemporaries to assimilate it, and I imagine that much of the development of detail will have to be performed by younger men whom your ideas will stimulate to coruscate in manners unexpected by yourself. To me at present the vital achievement of the book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-wound upon Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all the inertia of the past is in it, and the spirit of professionalism and pedantry as well as the æsthetic-intellectual delight of dealing with categories logically distinct yet logically connected, will rally for a desperate defense. The _élan vital_, all contentless and vague as you are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of. But the beast _has_ its death-wound now, and the manner in which you have inflicted it (interval _versus_ temps d'arrêt, etc.) is masterly in the extreme. I don't know why this later _rédaction_ of your critique of the mathematics of movement has seemed to me so much more telling than the early statement--I suppose it is because of the wider _use_ made of the principle in the book. You will be receiving my own little "pragmatism" book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks. The position we are rescuing is "Tychism" and a really growing world. But whereas I have hitherto found no better way of defending Tychism than by affirming the spontaneous addition of _discrete_ elements of being (or their subtraction), thereby playing the game with intellectualist weapons, you set things straight at a single stroke by your fundamental conception of the continuously creative nature of reality. I think that one of your happiest strokes is your reduction of "finality," as usually taken, to its status alongside of efficient causality, as the twin-daughters of intellectualism. But this vaguer and truer finality restored to its rights will be a difficult thing to give content to. Altogether your reality lurks so in the background, in this book, that I am wondering whether you _couldn't_ give it any more development _in concreto_ here, or whether you perhaps were holding back developments, already in your possession, for a future volume. They are sure to come to you later anyhow, and to make a new volume; and altogether, the clash of these ideas of yours with the traditional ones will be sure to make sparks fly that will illuminate all sorts of dark places and bring innumerable new considerations into view. But the process may be slow, for the ideas are so revolutionary. Were it not for your style, your book might last 100 years unnoticed; but your way of writing is so absolutely commanding that your theories have to be attended to immediately. I feel very much in the dark still about the relations of the progressive to the regressive movement, and this great precipitate of nature subject to static categories. With a frank pluralism of _beings_ endowed with vital impulses you can get oppositions and compromises easily enough, and a stagnant deposit; but after my one reading I don't exactly "catch on" to the way in which the continuum of reality resists itself so as to have to act, etc., etc. The only part of the work which I felt like positively criticising was the discussion of the idea of nonentity, which seemed to me somewhat overelaborated, and yet didn't leave me with a sense that the last word had been said on the subject. But all these things must be very slowly digested by me. I can see that, when the tide turns in your favor, many previous tendencies in philosophy will start up, crying "This is nothing but what _we_ have contended for all along." Schopenhauer's blind will, Hartmann's unconscious, Fichte's aboriginal freedom (reëdited at Harvard in the most "unreal" possible way by Münsterberg) will all be claimants for priority. But no matter--all the better if you are in some ancient lines of tendency. Mysticism also must make claims and doubtless just ones. I say nothing more now--this is just my first reaction; but I am so enthusiastic as to have said only two days ago, "I thank heaven that I have lived to this date--that I have witnessed the Russo-Japanese war, and seen Bergson's new book appear--the two great modern turning-points of history and of thought!" Best congratulations and cordialest regards! Wm. James. _To T. S. Perry._ SILVER LAKE, N.H., _June 24, 1907_. DEAR THOS.,--Yours of the 11th is at hand, true philosopher that you are. No one but one bawn & bred in the philosophic briar-patch could appreciate Bergson as you do, without in the least understanding him. I am in an identical predicament. This last of his is the _divinest_ book that has appeared in _my_ life-time, and (unless I am the falsest prophet) it is destined to rank with the greatest works of all time. The style of it is as wonderful as the matter. By all means send it to Chas. Peirce, but address him Prescott Hall, Cambridge. I am sending you my "Pragmatism," which Bergson's work makes seem like small potatoes enough. Are you going to Russia to take Stolypin's place? or to head the Revolution? I would I were at Giverny to talk metaphysics with you, and enjoy a country where I am not responsible for the droughts and the garden. Have been here two weeks at Chocorua, getting our place ready for a tenant. Affectionate regards to you all. W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ LINCOLN, MASS., _Aug. 5, 1907_. DEAR MILLER,--I got your letter about "Pragmatism," etc., some time ago. I hear that you are booked to review it for the "Hibbert Journal." Lay on, Macduff! as hard as you can--I want to have the weak places pointed out. I sent you a week ago a "Journal of Philosophy"[81] with a word more about Truth in it, written _at_ you mainly; but I hardly dare hope that I have cleared up my position. A letter from Strong, two days ago, written after receiving a proof of that paper, still thinks that I deny the existence of realities outside of the thinker; and [R. B.] Perry, who seems to me to have written far and away the most important critical remarks on Pragmatism (possibly the _only_ important ones), accused Pragmatists (though he doesn't name _me_) of ignoring or denying that the real object plays any part in deciding what ideas are true. I confess that such misunderstandings seem to me hardly credible, and cast a "lurid light" on the mutual understandings of philosophers generally. Apparently it all comes from the _word_ Pragmatism--and a most unlucky word it may prove to have been. I am a natural realist. The world _per se_ may be likened to a cast of beans on a table. By themselves they spell nothing. An onlooker may group them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map them. He may select groups and name these capriciously, or name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his. Whatever he does, so long as he _takes account_ of them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? It _fits_ the beans-_minus_-him, and _expresses_ the _total_ fact, of beans-_plus_-him. Truth in this total sense is partially ambiguous, then. If he simply counts or maps, he obeys a subjective interest as much as if he traces figures. Let that stand for pure "intellectual" treatment of the beans, while grouping them variously stands for non-intellectual interests. All that Schiller and I contend for is that there is _no_ "truth" without _some_ interest, and that non-intellectual interests play a part as well as intellectual ones. Whereupon we are accused of denying the beans, or denying being in anyway constrained by them! It's too silly!... _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ PUTNAM SHANTY, KEENE VALLEY, _Sept. 14, 1907_. DEAR PAULINE,-- ...No "camping" for me this side the grave! A party of fourteen left here yesterday for Panther Gorge, meaning to return by the Range, as they call your "summit trail." Apparently it is easier than when on that to me memorable day we took it, for Charley Putnam swears he has done it in five and a half hours. I don't well understand the difference, except that they don't reach Haystack over Marcy as we did, and there is now a good trail. Past and future play such a part in the way one feels the present. To these youngsters, as to me long ago, and to you today, the rapture of the connexion with these hills is partly made of the sense of future power over them and their like. That being removed from me, I can only mix memories of past power over them with the present. But I have always observed a curious _fading_ in what Tennyson calls the "passion" of the past. Memories awaken little or no sentiment when they are too old; and I have taken everything here so prosily this summer that I find myself wondering whether the time-limit has been exceeded, and whether for emotional purpose I am a new self. We know not what we shall become; and that is what makes life so interesting. Always a turn of the kaleidoscope; and when one is utterly maimed for action, then the glorious time for _reading_ other men's lives! I fairly revel in that prospect, which in its full richness has to be postponed, for I'm not sufficiently maimed-for-action yet. By going slowly and alone, I find I can compass such things as the Giant's Washbowl, Beaver Meadow Falls, etc., and they make me feel very good. I have even been dallying with the temptation to visit Cameron Forbes at Manila; but I have put it behind me for this year at least. I think I shall probably give some more lectures (of a much less "popular" sort) at Columbia next winter--so you see there's life in the old dog yet. Nevertheless, how different from the life that courses through _your_ arteries and capillaries! Today is the first honestly fine day there has been since I arrived here on the 2nd. (They must have been heavily rained on at Panther Gorge yesterday evening.) After writing a couple more letters I will take a book and repair to "Mosso's Ledge" for the enjoyment of the prospect.... _To W. Jerusalem_ (Vienna). ST. HUBERT'S, N.Y. _Sept._ 15, 1907. DEAR PROFESSOR JERUSALEM,--Your letter of the 1st of September, forwarded from Cambridge, reaches me here in the Adirondack Mountains today. I am glad the publisher is found, and that you are enjoying the drudgery of translating ["Pragmatism"]. Also that you find the book more and more in agreement with your own philosophy. I fear that its untechnicality of style--or rather its deliberate _anti_-technicality--will make the German _Gelehrtes Publikum_,[82] as well as the professors, consider it _oberflächliches Zeug_[83]--which it assuredly is not, although, being only a sketch, it ought to be followed by something _tighter_ and abounding in discriminations. Pragmatism is an unlucky word in some respects, and the two meanings I give for it are somewhat heterogeneous. But it was already in vogue in France and Italy as well as in England and America, and it was _tactically_ advantageous to use it.... _To Henry James._ STONEHURST, INTERVALE, N.H., _Oct._ 6, 1907. DEAREST BROTHER,--I write this at the [James] Bryces', who have taken the Merrimans' house for the summer, and whither I came the day before yesterday, after closing our Chocorua house, and seeing Alice leave for home. We had been there a fortnight, trying to get some work done, and having to do most of it with our own hands, or rather with Alice's heroic hands, for mine are worth almost nothing in these degenerate days. It is enough to make your heart break to see the scarcity of "labor," and the whole country tells the same story. Our future at Chocorua is a somewhat problematic one, though I think we shall manage to pass next summer there and get it into better shape for good renting, thereafter, at any cost (not the renting but the shaping). After that what _I_ want is a free foot, and the children are now not dependent on a family summer any longer.... I spent the first three weeks of September--warm ones--in my beloved and exquisite Keene Valley, where I was able to do a good deal of uphill walking, with good rather than bad effects, much to my joy. Yesterday I took a three hours walk here, three quarters of an hour of it uphill. I have to go alone, and slowly; but it's none the worse for that and makes one feel like old times. I leave this P.M. for two more days at Chocorua--at the hotel. The fall is late, but the woods are beginning to redden beautifully. With the sun behind them, some maples look like stained-glass windows. But the penury of the human part of this region is depressing, and I begin to have an appetite for Europe again. Alice too! To be at Cambridge with no lecturing and no students to nurse along with their thesis-work is an almost incredibly delightful prospect. I am going to settle down to the composition of another small book, more original and ground-breaking than anything I have yet put forth(!), which I expect to print by the spring; after which I can lie back and write at leisure more routine things for the rest of my days. The Bryces are wholly unchanged, excellent friends and hosts, and I like her as much as him. The trouble with him is that his insatiable love of information makes him try to pump _you_ all the time instead of letting you pump _him_, and I have let my own tongue wag so, that, when gone, I shall feel like a fool, and remember all kinds of things that I have forgotten to ask him. I have just been reading to Mrs. B., with great gusto on her part and renewed gusto on mine, the first few pages of your chapter on Florida in "The American Scene." _Köstlich_ stuff! I had just been reading to myself almost 50 pages of the New England part of the book, and fairly melting with delight over the Chocorua portion. Evidently that book will last, and bear reading over and over again--a few pages at a time, which is the right way for "literature" fitly so called. It all makes me wish that we had you here again, and you will doubtless soon come. I mustn't forget to thank you for the gold pencil-case souvenir. I have had a plated silver one for a year past, now worn through, and experienced what a "comfort" they are. Good-bye, and Heaven bless you. Your loving W. J. _To Theodore Flournoy._ Cambridge, _Jan._ 2, 1908. ...I am just back from the American Philosophical Association, which had a really delightful meeting at Cornell University in the State of New York. Mostly epistemological. We are getting to know each other and understand each other better, and shall do so year by year, Everyone cursed my doctrine and Schiller's about "truth." I think it largely is misunderstanding, but it is also due to our having expressed our meaning very ill. The general blanket-word pragmatism covers so many different opinions, that it naturally arouses irritation to see it flourished as a revolutionary flag. I am also partly to blame here; but it was _tactically_ wise to use it as a title. Far more persons have had their attention attracted, and the result has been that everybody has been forced to think. Substantially I have nothing to alter in what I have said.... I have just read the first half of Fechner's "Zend-Avesta," a wonderful book, by a wonderful genius. He had his vision and he knows how to discuss it, as no one's vision ever was discussed. I may tell you in confidence (I don't talk of it here because my damned arteries may in the end make me give it up--for a year past I have a sort of angina when I make efforts) that I have accepted an invitation to give eight public lectures at Oxford next May. I was ashamed to refuse; but the work of preparing them will be hard (the title is "The Present Situation in Philosophy"[84]) and they doom me to relapse into the "popular lecture" form just as I thought I had done with it forever. (What I wished to write this winter was something ultra dry in form, impersonal and exact.) I find that my free and easy and personal way of writing, especially in "Pragmatism," has made me an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds, and I am rather tired of awakening that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably destine me to increase. ...I have been with Strong, who goes to Rome this month. Good, truth-loving man! and a very penetrating mind. I think he will write a great book. We greatly enjoyed seeing your friend Schwarz, the teacher. A fine fellow who will, I hope, succeed. A happy New Year to you now, dear Flournoy, and loving regards from us all to you all. Yours as ever Wm. James. _To Norman Kemp Smith._ [Post-card] Cambridge, _Jan._ 31, 1908. I have only just "got round" to your singularly solid and compact study of Avenarius in "Mind." I find it clear and very clarifying, after the innumerable hours I have spent in trying to dishevel him. I have read the "Weltbegriff" three times, and have half expected to have to read both books over again to assimilate his immortal message to man, of which I have hitherto been able to make nothing. You set me free! I shall not re-read him! but leave him to his spiritual dryness and preposterous pedantry. His only really original idea seems to be that of the _Vitalreihe_, and that, so far as I can see, is quite false, certainly no improvement on the notion of adaptive reflex actions. Wm. James. _To his Daughter._ Cambridge, _Apr._ 2, 1908, DARLING PEG,--You must have wondered at my silence since your dear mother returned. I hoped to write to you each day, but the strict routine of my hours now crowded it out. I write on my Oxford job till one, then lunch, then nap, then to my ... doctor at four daily, and from then till dinner-time making calls, and keeping "out" as much as possible. To bed as soon after 8 as possible--all my odd reading done between 3 and 5 A.M., an hour not favorable for letter-writing--so that my necessary business notes have to get in just before dinner (as now) or after dinner, which I hate and try to avoid. I think I see my way clear to go [to Oxford] now, if I don't get more fatigued than at present. Four and a quarter lectures are fully written, and the rest are down-hill work, much raw material being ready now.... _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _April_ 15, 1908. DEAREST HENRY,--Your good letter to Harry has brought news of your play, of which I had only seen an enigmatic paragraph in the papers. I'm right glad it is a success, and that such good artists as the Robertsons are in it. I hope it will have a first-rate run in London. Your apologies for not writing are the most uncalled-for things--your assiduity and the length of your letters to this family are a standing marvel--especially considering the market-value of your "copy"! So waste no more in that direction. 'Tis I who should be prostrating myself--silent as I've been for months in spite of the fact that I'm so soon to descend upon you. The fact is I've been trying to compose the accursed lectures in a state of abominable brain-fatigue--a race between myself and time. I've got six now done out of the eight, so I'm safe, but sorry that the infernal nervous condition that with me always accompanies literary production must continue at Oxford and add itself to the other fatigues--a fixed habit of wakefulness, etc. I ought not to have accepted, but they've panned out good, so far, and if I get through them successfully, I shall be very glad that the opportunity came. They will be a good thing to _have done_. Previously, in such states of fatigue, I have had a break and got away, but this time no day without its half dozen pages--but the thing hangs on so long!... _To Henry James._ R. M. S. IVERNIA, [Arriving at Liverpool], _Apr. 29, 1908_. DEAR H.,--Your letter of the 26th, unstamped or post-marked, has just been wafted into our lap--I suppose mailed under another cover to the agent's care. I'm glad you're not hurrying from Paris--I feared you might be awaiting us in London, and wrote you a letter yesterday to the Reform Club, which you will doubtless get ere you get this, telling you of our prosperous though tedious voyage in good condition. We cut out London and go straight to Oxford, _via_ Chester. I have been sleeping like a top, and feel in good fighting trim again, eager for the scalp of the Absolute. My lectures will put his wretched clerical defenders fairly on the defensive. They begin on Monday. Since you'll have the whole months of May and June, if you urge it, to see us, I pray you not to hasten back from "gay Paree" for the purpose.... Up since two A.M. W. J. _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ PATTERDALE, ENGLAND, _July 2, 1908_. Your letter, beloved Pauline, greeted me on my arrival here three hours ago.... How I _do wish_ that I could be in Italy alongside of you now, now or any time! You could do me so much good, and your ardor of enjoyment of the country, the towns and the folk would warm up my cold soul. I might even learn to speak Italian by conversing in that tongue with you. But I fear that you'd find me betraying the coldness of my soul by complaining of the heat of my body--a most unworthy attitude to strike. Dear Paolina, never, never think of whether your body is hot or cold; live in the _objective_ world, above such miserable considerations. I have been up here eight days, Alice having gone down last Saturday, the 27th, to meet Peggy and Harry at London, after only two days of it. After all the social and other fever of the past six and a half weeks (save for the blessed nine days at Bibury), it looked like the beginning of a real vacation, and it would be such but for the extreme heat, and the accident of one of my recent malignant "colds" beginning. I have been riding about on stage-coaches for five days past, but the hills are so treeless that one gets little shade, and the sun's glare is tremendous. It is a lovely country, however, for pedestrianizing in cooler weather. Mountains and valleys compressed together as in the Adirondacks, great reaches of pink and green hillside and lovely lakes, the higher parts quite fully alpine in character but for the fact that no snow mountains form the distant background. A strong and noble region, well worthy of one's life-long devotion, if one were a Briton. And on the whole, what a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Every thing about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.--with but few exceptions, I imagine. And the equilibrium is so well achieved, and the human tone so cheery, blithe and manly! and the manners so delightfully good. Not one _unwholesome_-looking man or woman does one meet here for 250 that one meets in America. Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it, and thou in 22nd St. and I in Irving St. must do our respective strokes, which after 1000 years will help to have made the glorious collective resultant. Meanwhile, as my brother Henry once wrote, thank God for a world that holds so rich an England, so rare an Italy! Alice is entirely _aufgegangen_ in her idealization of it. And truly enough, the gardens, the manners, the manliness are an excuse. But profound as is my own moral respect and admiration, for a _vacation_ give me the Continent! The civilization here is too heavy, too _stodgy_, if one could use so unamiable a word. The very stability and good-nature of all things (of course we are leaving out the slum-life!) rest on the basis of the national stupidity, or rather unintellectuality, on which as on a safe foundation of non-explosible material, the magnificent minds of the élite of the race can coruscate as they will, safely. Not until those weeks at Oxford, and these days at Durham, have I had any sense of what a part the Church plays in the national life. So massive and all-pervasive, so authoritative, and on the whole so decent, in spite of the iniquity and farcicality of the whole thing. Never were incompatibles so happily yoked together. Talk about the genius of Romanism! It's nothing to the genius of Anglicanism, for Catholicism still contains some haggard elements, that ally it with the Palestinian desert, whereas Anglicanism remains obese and round and comfortable and decent with this world's decencies, without an _acute_ note in its whole life or history, in spite of the shrill Jewish words on which its ears are fed, and the nitro-glycerine of the Gospels and Epistles which has been injected into its veins. Strange feat to have achieved! Yet the success is great--the whole Church-machine makes for all sorts of graces and decencies, and is not incompatible with a high type of Churchman, high, that is, on the side of moral and worldly virtue.... How I wish you were beside me at this moment! A breeze has arisen on the Lake which is spread out before the "smoking-room" window at which I write, and is very grateful. The lake much resembles Lake George. Your ever grateful and loving W. J. _To Charles Eliot Norton._ PATTERDALE, ENGLAND, _July 6, 1908_. DEAR CHARLES,--Going to Coniston Lake the other day and seeing the moving little Ruskin Museum at Coniston (admission a penny) made me think rather vividly of you, and make a resolution to write to you on the earliest opportunity. It was truly moving to see such a collection of R.'s busy handiwork, exquisite and loving, in the way of drawing, sketching, engraving and note-taking, and also such a varied lot of photographs of him, especially in his old age. Glorious old Don Quixote that he was! At Durham, where Alice and I spent three and a half delightful days at the house of F. B. Jevons, Principal of one of the two colleges of which the University is composed, I had a good deal of talk with the very remarkable octogenarian Dean of the Cathedral and Lord of the University, a thorough liberal, or rather radical, in his mind, with a voice like a bell, and an alertness to match, who had been a college friend of Ruskin's and known him intimately all his life, and loved him. He knew not of his correspondence with you, of which I have been happy to be able to order Kent of Harvard Square to send him a copy. His name is Kitchin. The whole scene at Durham was tremendously impressive (though York Cathedral made the stronger impression on me). It was so unlike Oxford, so much more American in its personnel, in a way, yet nestling in the very bosom of those mediæval stage-properties and ecclesiastical-principality suggestions. Oxford is all spread out in length and breadth, Durham concentrated in depth and thickness. There is a great deal of flummery about Oxford, but I think if I were an Oxonian, in spite of my radicalism generally, I might vote against all change there. It is an absolutely unique fruit of human endeavor, and like the cathedrals, can never to the end of time be reproduced, when the conditions that once made it are changed. Let other places of learning go in for all the improvements! The world can afford to keep her one Oxford unreformed. I know that this is a superficial judgment in both ways, for Oxford does manage to keep pace with the utilitarian spirit, and at the same time preserve lots of her flummery unchanged. On the whole it is a thoroughly _democratic_ place, so far as aristocracy in the strict sense goes. But I'm out of it, and doubt whether I want ever to put foot into it again.... England has changed in many respects. The West End of London, which used at this season to be so impressive from its splendor, is now a mixed and mongrel horde of straw hats and cads of every description. Motor-buses of the most brutal sort have replaced the old carriages, Bond and Regent Streets are cheap-jack shows, everything is tumultuous and confused and has run down in quality. I have been "motoring" a good deal through this "Lake District," owing to the kindness of some excellent people in the hotel, dissenters who rejoice in the name of Squance and inhabit the neighborhood of Durham. It is wondrous fine, but especially adapted to trampers, which I no longer am. Altogether England seems to have got itself into a magnificently fine state of civilization, especially in regard to the cheery and wholesome tone of manners of the people, improved as it is getting to be by the greater infusion of the democratic temper. Everything here seems about twice as good as the corresponding thing with us. But I suspect we have the bigger eventual destiny after all; and give us a thousand years and we may catch up in many details. I think of you as still at Cambridge, and I do hope that physical ills are bearing on more gently. Lily, too, I hope is her well self again. You mustn't think of answering this, which is only an ejaculation of friendship--I shall be home almost before you can get an answer over. Love to all your circle, including Theodora, whom I miss greatly. Affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Henri Bergson._ LAMB HOUSE, _July 28, 1908_. DEAR BERGSON,--(can't we cease "Professor"-ing each other?--that title establishes a "disjunctive relation" between man and man, and our relation should be "endosmotic" socially as well as intellectually, I think),-- _Jacta est alea_, I am not to go to Switzerland! I find, after a week or more here, that the monotony and simplification is doing my nervous centres so much good, that my wife has decided to go off with our daughter to Geneva, and to leave me alone with my brother here, for repairs. It is a great disappointment in other ways than in not seeing you, but I know that it is best. Perhaps later in the season the _Zusammenkunft_ may take place, for nothing is decided beyond the next three weeks. Meanwhile let me say how rarely delighted your letter made me. There are many points in your philosophy which I don't yet grasp, but I have seemed to myself to understand your anti-intellectualistic campaign very clearly, and that I have really done it so well in your opinion makes me proud. I am sending your letter to Strong, partly out of vanity, partly because of your reference to him. It does seem to me that philosophy is turning towards a new orientation. Are you a reader of Fechner? I wish that you would read his "Zend-Avesta," which in the second edition (1904, I think) is better printed and much easier to read than it looks at the first glance. He seems to me of the real race of prophets, and I cannot help thinking that _you_, in particular, if not already acquainted with this book, would find it very stimulating and suggestive. His day, I fancy, is yet to come. I will write no more now, but merely express my regret (and hope) and sign myself, yours most warmly and sincerely, Wm. James. The subject of the next letter was a volume of "Essays Philosophical and Psychological, in Honor of William James,"[85] by nineteen contributors, which had been issued by Columbia University in the spring of 1908. A note at the beginning of the book said: "This volume is intended to mark in some degree its authors' sense of Professor James's memorable services in philosophy and psychology, the vitality he has added to those studies, and the encouragement that has flowed from him to colleagues without number. Early in 1907, at the invitation of Columbia University, he delivered a course of lectures there, and met the members of the Philosophical and Psychological Departments on several occasions for social discussion. They have an added motive for the present work in the recollections of this visit." _To John Dewey._ RYE, SUSSEX, _Aug. 4, 1908_. DEAR DEWEY,--I don't know whether this will find you in the Adirondacks or elsewhere, but I hope 'twill be on East Hill. My own copy of the Essays in my "honor," which took me by complete surprise on the eve of my departure, was too handsome to take along, so I have but just got round to reading the book, which I find at my brother Henry's, where I have recently come. It is a masterly set of essays of which we may all be proud, distinguished by good style, direct dealing with the facts, and hot running on the trail of truth, regardless of previous conventions and categories. I am sure it hitches the subject of epistemology a good day's journey ahead, and proud indeed am I that it should be dedicated to my memory. Your own contribution is to my mind the most _weighty_--unless perhaps Strong's should prove to be so. I rejoice exceedingly that you should have got it out. No one yet has succeeded, it seems to me, in jumping into the centre of your vision. Once there, all the perspectives are clear and open; and when you or some one else of us shall have spoken the exact word that opens the centre to everyone, mediating between it and the old categories and prejudices, people will wonder that there ever could have been any other philosophy. That it is the philosophy of the future, I'll bet my life. Admiringly and affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _Aug. 9, 1908_. DEAR FLOURNOY,--I can't make out from my wife's letters whether she has seen you face to face, or only heard accounts of you from Madame Flournoy. She reports you very tired from the "Congress"--but I don't know what Congress has been meeting at Geneva just now. I don't suppose that you will go to the philosophical congress at Heidelberg--I certainly shall not. I doubt whether philosophers will gain so much by talking with each other as other classes of _Gelehrten_ do. One needs to _frequenter_ a colleague daily for a month before one can begin to understand him. It seems to me that the collective life of philosophers is little more than an organization of misunderstandings. I gave eight lectures at Oxford, but besides Schiller and one other tutor, only two persons ever _mentioned_ them to me, and those were the two heads of Manchester College by whom I had been invited. Philosophical work it seems to me must go on in silence and in print exclusively. You will have heard (either directly or indirectly) from my wife of my reasons for not accompanying them to Geneva. I have been for more than three weeks now at my brother's, and am much better for the simplification. I am very sorry not to have met with you, but I think I took the prudent course in staying away. I have just read Miss Johnson's report in the last S. P. R. "Proceedings," and a good bit of the proofs of Piddington's on cross-correspondences between Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Mrs. Holland, which is to appear in the next number. You will be much interested, if you can gather the philosophical energy, to go through such an amount of tiresome detail. It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in the history of automatism; and Piddington's and Johnson's ability is of the highest order. Evidently "automatism" is a word that covers an extraordinary variety of fact. I suppose that you have on the whole been gratified by the "vindication" of Eusapia [Paladino] at the hands of Morselli _et al._ in Italy. Physical phenomena also seem to be entering upon a new phase in their history. Well, I will stop, this is only a word of greeting and regret at not seeing you. I got your letter of many weeks ago when we were at Oxford. Don't take the trouble to _write_ now--my wife will bring me all the news of you and your family, and will have given you all mine. Love to Madame F. and all the young ones, too, please. Your ever affectionate W. J. _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ PAIGNTON, S. DEVON, _Oct. 3, 1908_. DEAR HODGSON,--I have been five months in England (you have doubtless heard of my lecturing at Oxford) yet never given you a sign of life. The reason is that I have sedulously kept away from London, which I admire, but at my present time of life abhor, and only touched it two or three times for thirty-six hours to help my wife do her "shopping" (strange use for an elderly philosopher to be put to). The last time I was in London, about a month ago, I called at your affectionately remembered No. 45, only to find you gone to Yorkshire, as I feared I should. I go back in an hour, en route for Liverpool, whence, with wife and daughter, I sail for Boston in the Saxonia. I am literally enchanted with rural England, yet I doubt whether I ever return. I never had a fair chance of getting acquainted with the country here, and if I were a stout pedestrian, which I no longer am, I think I should frequent this land every summer. But in my decrepitude I must make the best of the more effortless relations which I enjoy with nature in my own country. I have seen many philosophers, at Oxford, especially, and James Ward at Cambridge; but, apart from _very_ few conversations, didn't get at close quarters with any of them, and they probably gained as little from me as I from them. "We are columns left alone, of a temple once complete." The power of mutual misunderstanding in philosophy seems infinite, and grows discouraging. Schiller of course, and his pragmatic friend Captain Knox, James Ward, and McDougall, stand out as the most satisfactory talkers. But there is too much fencing and scoring of "points" at Oxford to make construction active. Good-bye! dear Hodgson, and pray think of me with a little of the affection and intellectual interest with which I always think of you. My Oxford lectures won't appear till next April. Don't read the extracts which the "Hibbert Journal" is publishing. They are torn out of their natural setting. I have, as you probably know, ceased teaching and am enjoying a Carnegie pension. Yours ever fondly, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ LONDON, _Oct. 4, 1908_. DEAR FLOURNOY,--I got your delightful letter duly two weeks ago, or more. I always have a bad conscience on receiving a letter from you, because I feel as if I _forced_ you to write it, and I know too well by your own confessions (as well as by my own far less extreme experience of reluctance to write) what a nuisance and an effort letters are apt to be. But no matter! this letter of yours was a good one indeed.... We sail from Liverpool the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow will be a busy day winding up our affairs and making some last purchases of small things. Alice has an insatiable desire (as Mrs. Flournoy may have noticed at Geneva) to increase her possessions, whilst I, like an American Tolstoy, wish to diminish them. The most convenient arrangement for a Tolstoy is to have an anti-Tolstoyan wife to "run the house" for him. We have been for three days in Devonshire, and for four days at Oxford previous to that. Extraordinary warm summer weather, with exquisite atmospheric effects. I am extremely glad to leave England with my last optical images so beautiful. In any case the harmony and softness of the landscape of rural England probably excels everything in the world in that line. At Oxford I saw McDougall and Schiller quite intimately, also Schiller's friend, Capt. Knox, who, retired from the army, lives at Gründelwald, and is an extremely acute mind, and fine character, I should think. He is a militant "Pragmatist." Before that I spent three days at Cambridge, where again I saw James Ward intimately. I prophesy that if he gets his health again ... he will become also a militant pluralist of some sort. I think he has worked out his original monistic-theistic vein and is steering straight towards a "critical point" where the umbrella will turn inside out, and not go back. I hope so! I made the acquaintance of Boutroux here last week. He came to the "Moral Education Congress" where he made a very fine address. I find him very _simpatico_. [Illustration: William James and Henry Clement, at the "Putnam Shanty," in the Adirondacks (1907?).] But the best of all these meetings has been one of three hours this very morning with Bergson, who is here visiting his relatives. So modest and unpretending a man, but such a genius intellectually! We talked very easily together, or rather _he_ talked easily, for he talked much more than I did, and although I can't say that I follow the folds of his system much more clearly than I did before, he has made some points much plainer. I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning-point in the history of philosophy. So many things converge towards an anti-rationalistic crystallization. _Qui vivra verra!_ I am very glad indeed to go on board ship. For two months I have been more than ready to get back to my own habits, my own library and writing-table and bed.... I wish you, and all of you, a prosperous and healthy and resultful winter, and am, with old-time affection, your ever faithful friend, Wm. James. If the duty of writing weighs so heavily on you, why obey it? Why, for example, write any more reviews? I absolutely refuse to, and find that one great alleviation. _To Henri Bergson._ LONDON, _Oct. 4, 1908_. DEAR BERGSON,--My brother was sorry that you couldn't come. He wishes me to say that he is returning to Rye the day after tomorrow and is so engaged tomorrow that he will postpone the pleasure of meeting you to some future opportunity. I need hardly repeat how much I enjoyed our talk today. You must take care of yourself and economize all your energies for your own creative work. I want very much to see what you will have to say on the _Substanzbegriff_! Why should life be so short? I wish that you and I and Strong and Flournoy and McDougall and Ward could live on some mountain-top for a month, together, and whenever we got tired of philosophizing, calm our minds by taking refuge in the scenery. Always truly yours, Wm. James. _To H. G. Wells._ Cambridge, _Nov. 28, 1908_. DEAR WELLS,--"First and Last Things" is a great achievement. The first two "books" should be entitled "philosophy without humbug" and used as a textbook in all the colleges of the world. You have put your finger accurately on the true emphases, and--in the main--on what seem to me the true solutions (you are more monistic in your faith than I should be, but as long as you only call it "faith," that's your right and privilege), and the simplicity of your statements ought to make us "professionals" blush. I have been 35 years on the way to similar conclusions--simply because I started as a professional and had to _débrouiller_ them from all the traditional school rubbish. The other two books exhibit you in the character of the Tolstoy of the English world. A sunny and healthy-minded Tolstoy, as he is a pessimistic and morbid-minded Wells. Where the "higher synthesis" will be born, who shall combine the pair of you, Heaven only knows. But you are carrying on the same function, not only in that neither of your minds is boxed and boarded up like the mind of an ordinary human being, but all the contents down to the very bottom come out freely and unreservedly and simply, but in that you both have the power of contagious speech, and set the similar mood vibrating in the reader. Be happy in that such power has been put into your hands! This book is worth any 100 volumes on Metaphysics and any 200 of Ethics, of the ordinary sort. Yours, with friendliest regards to Mrs. Wells, most sincerely, Wm. James. _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _Dec. 19, 1908_. DEAREST H.,-- ...I write this at 6.30 [A.M.], in the library, which the blessed hard-coal fire has kept warm all night. The night has been still, thermometer 20°, and the dawn is breaking in a pure red line behind Grace Norton's house, into a sky empty save for a big morning star and the crescent of the waning moon. Not a cloud--a true American winter effect. But somehow "le grand puits de l'aurore" doesn't appeal to my sense of life, or challenge my spirits as formerly. It suggests no more enterprises to the decrepitude of age, which vegetates along, drawing interest merely on the investment of its earlier enterprises. The accursed "thoracic symptom" is a killer of enterprise with me, and I dare say that it is little better with you. But the less said of it the better--it doesn't diminish! My time has been consumed by interruptions almost totally, until a week ago, when I finally got down seriously to work upon my Hodgson report. It means much more labor than one would suppose, and very little result. I wish that I had never undertaken it. I am sending off a preliminary installment of it to be read at the S. P. R. meeting in January. That done, the rest will run off easily, and in a month I expect to actually begin the "Introduction to Philosophy," which has been postponed so long, and which I hope will add to income for a number of years to come. Your Volumes XIII and XIV arrived the other day--many thanks. We're subscribing to two copies of the work, sending them as wedding presents. I hope it will sell. Very enticing-looking, but I can't settle down to the prefaces as yet, the only thing I have been able to read lately being Lowes Dickinson's last book, "Justice and Liberty," which seems to me a decidedly big achievement from every point of view, and probably destined to have a considerable influence in moulding the opinion of the educated. Stroke upon stroke, from pens of genius, the competitive régime, so idolized 75 years ago, seems to be getting wounded to death. What will follow will be something better, but I never saw so clearly the slow effect of [the] accumulation of the influence of successive individuals in changing prevalent ideals. Wells and Dickinson will undoubtedly make the biggest steps of change.... Well dear brother! a merry Christmas to you--to you both, I trust, for I fancy Aleck will be with you when this arrives--and a happy New Year at its tail! Your loving W. J. _To T. S. Perry._ Cambridge, _Jan. 29, 1909_. BELOVED THOMAS, cher maître et confrère,--Your delightful letter about my Fechner article and about your having become a professional philosopher yourself came to hand duly, four days ago, and filled the heart of self and wife with joy. I always knew you was one, for to be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to _hate_ some one else's type of thinking, and if that some one else be a representative of the "classic" type of thought, then one is a pragmatist and owns the fulness of the truth. Fechner is indeed a dear, and I am glad to have introduced, so to speak, his speculations to the English world, although the Revd. Elwood Worcester has done so in a somewhat more limited manner in a recent book of his called "The Living Word"-(Worcester of Emmanuel Church, I mean, whom everyone has now begun to fall foul of for trying to reanimate the Church's healing virtue). Another case of newspaper crime! The reporters all got hold of it with their megaphones, and made the nation sick of the sound of its name. Whereas in former ages men strove hard for fame, obscurity is now the one thing to be _striven_ for. For _fame_, all one need do is to exist; and the reporter will do the rest--especially if you give them the address of your fotographer. I hope you're a spelling reformer--I send you the last publication from that quarter. I'm sure that simple spelling will make a page look better, just as a crowd looks better if everyone's clothes fit. Apropos of pragmatism, a learned Theban named---- has written a circus-performance of which he is the clown, called "Anti-pragmatisme." It has so much verve and good spirit that I feel like patting him on the back, and "sicking him on," but Lord! what a fool! I think I shall leave it unnoticed. I'm tired of reëxplaining what is already explained to satiety. Let _them_ say, now, for it is their turn, what the relation called truth consists in, what it is known as! I have had you on my mind ever since Jan. 1st, when we had our Friday evening Club-dinner, and I was deputed to cable you a happy New Year. The next day I couldn't get to the telegraph office; the day after I said to myself, "I'll save the money, and save him the money, for if he gets a cable, he'll be sure to cable back; so I'll write"; the following day, I forgot to; the next day I postponed the act; so from postponement to postponement, here I am. Forgive, forgive! Most affectionate remarks were made about you at the dinner, which generally doesn't err by wasting words on absentees, even on those gone to eternity.... I have just got off my report on the Hodgson control, which has stuck to my fingers all this time. It is a hedging sort of an affair, and I don't know what the Perry family will think of it. The truth is that the "case" is a particularly poor one for testing Mrs. Piper's claim to bring back spirits. It is _leakier_ than any other case, and intrinsically, I think, no stronger than many of her other good cases, certainly weaker than the G. P. case. I am also now engaged in writing a popular article, "the avowals of a psychical researcher," for the "American Magazine," in which I simply state without argument my own convictions, and put myself on record. I think that public opinion is just now taking a step forward in these matters--_vide_ the Eusapian boom! and possibly both these _Schriften_ of mine will add their influence. Thank you for the Charmes reception and for the earthquake correspondence! I envy you in clean and intelligent Paris, though our winter is treating us very mildly. A lovely sunny day today! Love to all of you! Yours fondly, W. J. The "Charmes reception" was a report of the speeches at the French Academy's reception of Francis Charmes. The "Eusapian boom" will have been understood to refer to current discussions of the medium Eusapia Paladino. * * * * * The next letter refers to a paper in which both James and Münsterberg had been "attacked" in such a manner that Münsterberg proposed to send a protest to the American Psychological Association. _To Hugo Münsterberg._ Cambridge, _Mar. 16, 1909_. DEAR MÜNSTERBERG,--Witmer has sent me the _corpus delicti_, and I find myself curiously unmoved. In fact he takes so much trouble over me, and goes at the job with such zest that I feel like "sicking him on," as they say to dogs. Perhaps the honor of so many pages devoted to one makes up for the dishonor of their content. It is really a great compliment to have anyone take so much trouble about one. Think of copying all Wundt's notes! But, dear Münsterberg, I hope you'll withdraw a second time your protest. I think it undignified to take such an attack seriously. Its excessive dimensions (in my case at any rate), and the smallness and remoteness of the provocation, stamp it as simply eccentric, and to show sensitiveness only gives it importance in the eyes of readers who otherwise would only smile at its extravagance. Besides, since these temperamental antipathies exist--why isn't it healthy that they should express themselves? For my part, I feel rather glad than otherwise that psychology is so live a subject that psychologists should "go for" each other in this way, and I think it all ought to happen _inside_ of our Association. We ought to cultivate tough hides there, so I hope that you will withdraw the protest. I have mentioned it only to Royce, and will mention it to no one else. I don't like the notion of Harvard people seeming "touchy"! Your fellow victim, W. J. _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1909_. DEAR JACK C.,--I'm not expecting you to _read_ my book, but only to "give me a thought" when you look at the cover. A certain witness at a poisoning case was asked how the corpse looked. "Pleasant-like and foaming at the mouth," was the reply. A good description of you, describing philosophy, in your letter. All that you say is true, and yet the conspiracy has to be carried on by us professors. Reality has to be _returned to_, after this long circumbendibus, though _Gavroche_ has it already. There _are_ concepts, anyhow. I am glad you lost the volume. It makes one less in existence and ought to send up the price of the remainder. Blessed spring! blessed spring! Love to you both from yours, Wm. James. The next post-card was written in acknowledgment of Professor Palmer's comments on "A Pluralistic Universe." _To G. H. Palmer._ [Post-card] Cambridge, _May 13, 1909_. "The finest critical mind of our time!" No one can mix the honey and the gall as you do! My conceit appropriates the honey--for the gall it makes indulgent allowance, as the inevitable watering of a pair of aged rationalist eyes at the effulgent sunrise of a new philosophic day! Thanks! thanks! for the honey. W. J. TO THEODORE FLOURNOY. CHOCORUA, JUNE 18, 1909. MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--You must have been wondering during all these weeks what has been the explanation of my silence. It has had two simple causes; 1st, laziness; and 2nd, uncertainty, until within a couple of days, about whether or not I was myself going to Geneva for the University Jubilee. I have been strongly tempted, not only by the "doctorate of theology," which you confidentially told me of (and which would have been a fertile subject of triumph over my dear friend Royce on my part, and of sarcasm on his part about academic distinctions, as well as a diverting episode generally among my friends,--I being so essentially profane a character), but by the hope of seeing you, and by the prospect of a few weeks in dear old Switzerland again. But the economical, hygienic and domestic reasons were all against the journey; so a few days ago I ceased coquetting with the idea of it, and have finally given it up. This postpones any possible meeting with you till next summer, when I think it pretty certain that Alice and I and Peggy will go to Europe again, and probably stay there for two years.... What with the Jubilee and the Congress, dear Flournoy, I fear that your own summer will not yield much healing repose. "Go through it like an automaton" is the best advice I can give you. I find that it is possible, on occasions of great strain, to get relief by ceasing all voluntary control. _Do_ nothing, and I find that something will do itself! and not so stupidly in the eyes of outsiders as in one's own. Claparède will, I suppose, be the chief executive officer at the Congress. It is a pleasure to see how he is rising to the top among psychologists, how large a field he covers, and with both originality and "humanity" (in the sense of the omission of the superfluous and technical, and preference for the probable). When will the Germans learn that part? I have just been reading Driesch's Gifford lectures, Volume II. Very exact and careful, and the work of a most powerful intellect. But why lug in, as he does, all that Kantian apparatus, when the questions he treats of are real enough and important enough to be handled directly and not smothered in that opaque and artificial veil? I find the book extremely suggestive, and should like to believe in its thesis, but I can't help suspecting that Driesch is unjust to the possibilities of purely mechanical action. Candle-flames, waterfalls, eddies in streams, to say nothing of "vortex atoms," seem to perpetuate themselves and repair their injuries. You ought to receive very soon my report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control. Some theoretic remarks I make at the end may interest you. I rejoice in the triumph of Eusapia all along the line--also in Ochorowicz's young Polish medium, whom you have seen. It looks at last as if something definitive and positive were in sight. I am correcting the proofs of a collection of what I have written on the subject of "truth"--it will appear in September under the title of "The Meaning of Truth, a Sequel to Pragmatism." It is already evident from the letters I am getting about the "Pluralistic Universe" that that book will 1st, be _read_; 2nd, be _rejected_ almost unanimously at first, and for very diverse reasons; but, 3rd, will continue to be bought and referred to, and will end by strongly influencing English philosophy. And now, dear Flournoy, good-bye! and believe me with sincerest affection for Mrs. Flournoy and the young people as well as for yourself, yours faithfully, Wm. James. _To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._ CHOCORUA, _July 12, 1909_. DEAR THEODORA,--We got your letter a week ago, and were very glad to hear of your prosperous installation, and good impressions of the place. I am sorry that Harry couldn't go to see you the first Sunday, but hope, if he didn't go for yesterday, that he will do so yet. When your social circle gets established, and routine life set up, I am sure that you will like Newport very much. As for ourselves, the place is only just beginning to smooth out. The instruments of labor had well-nigh all disappeared, and had to come piecemeal, each forty-eight hours after being ordered, so we have been using the cow as a lawn-mower, silver knives to carve with, and finger-nails for technical purposes generally. There is no labor known to man in which Alice has not indulged, and I have sought safety among the mosquitoes in the woods rather than remain to shirk my responsibilities in full view of them. We have hired a little mare, fearless of automobiles, we get our mail dally, we had company to dinner yesterday, relatives of Alice, the children will be here by the middle of the week, the woods are deliciously fragrant, and the weather, so far, cool--in fact we are _launched_ and the regular summer equilibrium will soon set in. The place is both pathetic and irresistible; I want to sell it, Alice wants to enlarge it--we shall end by doing neither, but discuss it to the end of our days. I have just read Shaler's autobiography, and it has fairly haunted me with the overflowing impression of his myriad-minded character. Full of excesses as he was, due to his intense vivacity, impulsiveness, and imaginativeness, his centre of gravity was absolutely steady, and I knew no man whose sense of the larger relation of things was always so true and right. Of all the minds I have known, his leaves the largest impression, and I miss him more than I have missed anyone before. You ought to read the book, especially the autobiographic half. Good-bye, dear Theodora. Alice joins her love to mine, and I am, as ever, yours affectionately, Wm. James. _To F. C. S. Schiller._ _Chocorua_, _Aug. 14, 1909_. DEAR SCHILLER,-- ...I got the other day a very candid letter from A. S. Pringle-Pattison, about my "Pluralistic Universe," in which he said: "It is supremely difficult to accept the conclusion of an actually growing universe, an actual addition to the sum of being or (if that expression be objectionable) to the intensity and scope of existence, to a growing God, in fact."--This seems to me very significant. On such minute little snags and hooks, do all the "difficulties" of philosophy hang. Call them categories, and sacred laws, principles of reason, etc., and you have the actual state of metaphysics, calling all the analogies of phenomenal life impossibilities. No more lecturing from W. J., thank you! either at Oxford or elsewhere. Affectionately thine, W. J. _To Theodore Flournoy._ CHOCORUA, S_ept. 28, 1909_. DEAR FLOURNOY,--We had fondly hoped that before now you might both, accepting my half-invitation, half-suggestion, be with us in this uncared-for-nature, so different from Switzerland, and you getting strengthened and refreshed by the change. _Dieu dispose_, indeed! The fact that _is_ never entered into our imagination! I give up all hope of you this year, unless it be for Cambridge, where, however, the conditions of repose will be less favorable for you.... I am myself going down to Cambridge on the fifth of October for two days of "inauguration" ceremonies of our new president, Lawrence Lowell.... There are so many rival universities in our country that advantage has to be taken of such changes to make the newspaper talk, and keep the name of Harvard in the public ear, so the occasion is to be almost as elaborate as a "Jubilee"; but I shall keep as much out of it as is officially possible, and come back to Chocorua on the 8th, to stay as late into October as we can, though probably not later than the 20th, after which the Cambridge winter will begin. It hasn't gone well with my health this summer, and beyond a little reading, I have done no work at all. I have, however, succeeded during the past year in preparing a volume on the "Meaning of Truth"--already printed papers for the most part--which you will receive in a few days after getting this letter, and which I think may help you to set the "pragmatic" account of Knowledge in a clearer light. I will also send you a magazine article on the mediums, which has just appeared, and which may divert you.[86] Eusapia Paladino, I understand, has just signed a contract to come to New York to be at the disposition of Hereward Carrington, an expert in medium's tricks, and author of a book on the same, who, together with Fielding and Bagally, also experts, formed the Committee of the London S. P. R., who saw her at Naples.... After Courtier's report on Eusapia, I don't think any "investigation" here will be worth much "scientifically"--the only advantage of her coming may possibly be to get some scientific men to believe that there is really a problem. Two other cases have been reported to me lately, which are worth looking up, and I shall hope to do so. How much your interests and mine keep step with each other, dear Flournoy. "Functional psychology," and the twilight region that surrounds the clearly lighted centre of experience! Speaking of "functional" psychology, Clark University, of which Stanley Hall is president, had a little international congress the other day in honor of the twentieth year of its existence. I went there for one day in order to see what Freud was like, and met also Yung of Zürich, who professed great esteem for you, and made a very pleasant impression. I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are. They can't fail to throw light on human nature; but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously "symbolism" is a most dangerous method. A newspaper report of the congress said that Freud had condemned the American religious therapy (which has such extensive results) as very "dangerous" because so "unscientific." Bah! Well, it is pouring rain and so dark that I must close. Alice joins me, dear Flournoy, in sending you our united love, in which all your children have a share. Ever yours, W. J. _To Shadworth H. Hodgson._ Cambridge, _Jan._ 1, 1910. A happy New Year to you, dear Hodgson, and may it bring a state of mind more recognizant of truth when you see it! Your jocose salutation of my account of truth is an epigrammatic commentary on the cross-purposes of philosophers, considering that on the very day (yesterday) of its reaching me, I had replied to a Belgian student writing a thesis on pragmatism, who had asked me to name my sources of inspiration, that I could only recognize two, Peirce, as quoted, and "S. H. H." with his method of attacking problems, by asking what their terms are "Known-as." Unhappy world, where grandfathers can't recognize their own grandchildren! Let us love each other all the same, dear Hodgson, though the grandchild be in your eyes a "prodigal." Affectionately yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The news of James's election as _Associé étranger_ of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, which had appeared in the Boston "Journal" a day or two before the next letter, had, of course, reached the American newspapers directly from Paris. The unread book by Bergson of which Mr. Chapman was to forward his manuscript-review was obviously "Le Rire," and Mr. Chapman's review may be found, not where the next letter but one might lead one to seek it, but in the files of the "Hibbert Journal." _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Jan._ 30, 1910. DEAR JACK,--Invincible epistolary laziness and a conscience humbled to the dust have conspired to retard this letter. God sent me straight to you with my story about Bergson's cablegram--the only other person to whom I have told it was Henry Higginson. _One_ of you must have put it into the Boston "Journal" of the next day,--_you_ of course, to humiliate me still the more,--so now I lie in the dust, spurning all the decorations and honors under which the powers and principalities are trying to bury me, and seeking to manifest the naked truth in my uncomely form. Never again, never again! Naked came I into life, and this world's vanities are not for me! You, dear Jack, are the only reincarnation of Isaiah and Job, and I praise God that he has let me live in your day. _Real_ values are known only to _you_! As for Bergson, I think your change of the word "comic" into the word "tragic" throughout his book is _impayable_, and I have no doubt it is true. I have only read half of him, so don't know how he is coming out. Meanwhile send me your own foolishness on the same subject, commend me to your liege lady, and believe me, shamefully yours, W. J. _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Feb._ 8, 1910. DEAR JACK,--Wonderful! wonderful! Shallow, incoherent, obnoxious to its own criticism of Chesterton and Shaw, off its balance, accidental, whimsical, false; but with central fires of truth "blazing fuliginous mid murkiest confusion," telling the reader nothing of the Comic except that it's smaller than the Tragic, but _readable_ and splendid, showing that the _man who wrote it_ is more than anything he can write! Pray patch some kind of a finale to it and send it to the "Atlantic"! Yours ever fondly, W. J. (Membre de I'Institut!) * * * * * The "specimen" which was enclosed with the following note has been lost. It was perhaps a bit of adulatory verse. What is said about "Harris and Shakespeare," as also in a later letter to Mr. T. S. Perry on the same subject, was written apropos of a book entitled "The Man Shakespeare, His Tragic Life-Story."[87] _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Feb._ 15, 1910. DEAR JACK,--Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims; yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his _is_ the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is mighty fun to read him through in order. I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever, [Illustration: signature my new signature] _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Mar. 26, 1910_. DEAR MILLER,--Your study of me arrives! and I have pantingly turned the pages to find the eulogistic adjectives, and find them in such abundance that my head swims. Glory to God that I have lived to see this day! to have so much said about me, and to be embalmed in literature like the great ones of the past! I didn't know I was so much, was all these things, and yet, as I read, I see that I was (or am?), and shall boldly assert myself when I go abroad. To speak in all dull soberness, dear Miller, it touches me to the quick that you should have hatched out this elaborate description of me with such patient and loving incubation. I have only spent five minutes over it so far, meaning to take it on the steamer, but I get the impression that it is almost unexampled in our literature as a piece of profound analysis of an individual mind. I'm sorry you stick so much to my psychological phase, which I care little for, now, and never cared much. This epistemological and metaphysical phase seems to me more original and important, and I haven't lost hopes of converting you entirely yet. Meanwhile, thanks! thanks! [Émile] Boutroux, who is a regular angel, has just left our house. I've written an account of his lectures which the "Nation" will print on the 31st. I should like you to look it over, hasty as it is. ...I hope that all these lectures on contemporaries (What a live place Columbia is!) will appear together in a volume. I can't easily believe that any will compare with yours as a thorough piece of interpretative work. We sail on Tuesday next. My thorax has been going the wrong way badly this winter, and I hope that Nauheim may patch it up. Strength to your elbow! Affectionately and gratefully yours, Wm. James. XVII 1910 _Final Months--The End_ SEVERAL reasons combined to take James to Europe in the early spring of 1910. His heart had been giving him more discomfort. He wished to consult a specialist in Paris from whom an acquaintance of his, similarly afflicted, had received great benefit. He believed that another course of Nauheim baths would be helpful. Last, and not least, he wished to be within reach of his brother Henry, who was ill and concerning whose condition he was much distressed. In reality it was he, not his brother, who already stood in the shadow of Death's door. Accordingly he sailed for England with Mrs. James, and went first to Lamb House. Thence he crossed alone to Paris, and thence went on to Nauheim, leaving Mrs. James to bring his brother to Nauheim to join him. The Parisian specialist could do nothing but confirm previous diagnoses. Too much "sitting up and talking" with friends in Paris exhausted him seriously, and, after leaving Paris, he failed for the first time to shake off his fatigue. The immediate effect of the Nauheim baths proved to be very debilitating, and, again, he failed to rally and improve when he had finished them. By July, after trying the air of Lucerne and Geneva, only to find that the altitude caused him unbearable distress, he despaired of any relief beyond what now looked like the incomparable consolations of being at rest in his own home. So he turned his face westward. The next letters bid good-bye for the summer to two tried friends. Five months later it seemed as if James had been at more pains to make his adieus than he usually put himself to on account of a summer's absence. When Mrs. James returned to the Cambridge house in the autumn, after he had died, and had occasion to open his desk copy of the Harvard Catalogue, she found these words jotted at the head of the Faculty List: "A thousand regrets cover every beloved name." It grieved him that life was too short and too full for him to see many of them as often as he wanted to. One day before he sailed, his eye had been caught by the familiar names and, as a throng of comradely intentions filled his heart, he had had a moment of foreboding, and he had let his hand trace the words that cried this needless "Forgive me!" and recorded an incommunicable Farewell. _To Henry L. Higginson._ Cambridge, _Mar. 28, 1910_. BELOVED HENRY,--I had most positive hopes of driving in to see you ere the deep engulfs us, but the press is too great here, and it remains impossible. This is just a word to say that you are not forgotten, or ever to be forgotten, and that (after what Mrs. Higginson said) I am hoping you may sail yourself pretty soon, and have a refreshing time, and cross our path. We go straight to Rye, expecting to be in Paris for the beginning of April for a week, and then to Nauheim, whence Alice, after seeing me safely settled, will probably return to Rye for the heft of the summer. It would pay you to turn up both there and at Nauheim and see the mode of life. Hoping you'll have a good [Club] dinner Friday night, and never need any surgery again, I am ever thine, W. J. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ Cambridge, _March 29, 1910_. DEAREST FANNY,--Your beautiful roses and your card arrived duly--the roses were not deserved, not at least by W. J. I have about given up all visits to Boston this winter, and the racket has been so incessant in the house, owing to foreigners of late, that we haven't had the strength to send for you. I sail on the 29th in the Megantic, first to see Henry, who has been ill, not dangerously, but very miserably. Our Harry is with him now. I shall then go to Paris for a certain medical experiment, and after that report at Nauheim, where they probably will keep me for some weeks. I hope that I may get home again next fall with my organism in better shape, and be able to see more of my friends. After Thursday, when the good Boutrouxs go, I shall try to arrange a meeting with you, dear Fanny. At present we are "contemporaries," that is all, and the one of us who becomes survivor will have regrets that we were no more! What a lugubrious ending! With love to your mother, and love from Alice, believe me, dearest Fanny, most affectionately yours, W. J. _To T, S. Perry._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 22, 1910_. BELOVED THOS.,--I have two letters from you--one about ... Harris on Shakespeare. _Re_ Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious _a priori_, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless _that's the way to write about Shakespeare_, and I am sure that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who treat him as a classic moralist. He seems to me to have been a professional _amuser_, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperæsthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect?--But _halte-la_! or I shall become a Harris myself!... With love to you all, believe me ever thine, W. J. Read Daniel Halévy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche. _To François Pillon._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 25, 1910_. MY DEAR PILLON,--I have been here a week, taking the baths for my unfortunate cardiac complications, and shall probably stay six weeks longer. I passed through Paris, where I spent a week, partly with my friend the philosopher Strong, partly at the Fondation Thiers with the Boutrouxs, who had been our guests in America when he lectured a few months ago at Harvard. Every day I said: "I will get to the Pillons this afternoon"; but every day I found it impossible to attempt your four flights of stairs, and finally had to run away from the Boutrouxs' to save my life from the fatigue and pectoral pain which resulted from my seeing so many people. I have a dilatation of the aorta, which causes anginoid pain of a bad kind whenever I make any exertion, muscular, intellectual, or social, and I should not have thought at all of going through Paris were it not that I wished to consult a certain Dr. Moutier there, who is strong on arteries, but who told me that he could do nothing for my case. I hope that these baths may arrest the disagreeable tendency to _pejoration_ from which I have suffered in the past year. This is why I didn't come to see the dear Pillons; a loss for which I felt, and shall always feel, deep regret. The sight of the new "Année Philosophique" at Boutroux's showed me how valiant and solid you still are for literary work. I read a number of the book reviews, but none of the articles, which seemed uncommonly varied and interesting. Your short notice of Schinz's really _bouffon_ book showed me to my regret that even you have not yet caught the true inwardness of my notion of Truth. You speak as if I allowed no _valeur de connaissance proprement dite_, which is a quite false accusation. When an idea "works" successfully among _all the other ideas_ which relate to the object of which it is our mental substitute, associating and comparing itself with them harmoniously, the workings are wholly inside of the intellectual world, and the idea's value purely intellectual, for the time, at least. This is my doctrine and Schiller's, but it seems very hard to express it so as to get it understood! I hope that, in spite of the devouring years, dear Madame Pillon's state of health may be less deplorable than it has been so long. In particular I wish that the neuritis may have ceased. I wish! I wish! but what's the use of wishing, against the universal law that "youth's a stuff will not endure," and that we must simply make the best of it? Boutroux gave some beautiful lectures at Harvard, and is the gentlest and most lovable of characters. Believe me, dear Pillon, and dear Madame Pillon, your ever affectionate old friend, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 29, 1910_. ...Paris was splendid, but fatiguing. Among other things I was introduced to the Académie des Sciences Morales, of which you may likely have heard that I am now an _associé étranger_(!!). Boutroux says that Renan, when he took his seat after being received at the Académie Française, said: "Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil" (it is nothing but a cushioned bench with no back!). "Peut-être n'y a-t-il que cela de vrai!" Delicious Renanesque remark!... W. J. * * * * * The arrangement by which Mrs. James and Henry James were to have arrived at Nauheim had been upset. The two, who were to come from England together, were delayed by Henry's condition; and for a while James was at Nauheim alone. _To his Daughter._ _Bad-Nauheim_, _May 29, 1910_. BELOVED PÉGUY,--The very _fust_ thing I want you to do is to look in the drawer marked "Blood" in my tall filing case in the library closet, and find the _date_ of a number of the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" there that contains an article called "Philosophic Reveries." Send this _date_ (not the article) to the Revd. Prof. L. P. Jacks, 28 Holywell, Oxford, if you find it, _immediately_. He will understand what to do with it. If you don't find the article, do nothing! Jacks is notified. I have just corrected the proofs of an article on Blood for the "Hibbert Journal," which, I think, will make people sit up and rub their eyes at the apparition of a new great writer of English. I want Blood himself to get it as a surprise. _I_ got as a surprise your finely typed copy of the rest of my MS., the other day. I thank you for it; also for your delightful letters. The type-writing seems to set free both your and Aleck's genius more than the pen. (If you need a new ribbon it must be got from the agency in Milk St. just above Devonshire--but you'll find it hard work to get it into its place.) You seem to be leading a very handsome and domestic life, avoiding social excitements, and hearing of them only from the brethren. It is good sometimes to face the naked ribs of reality as it reveals itself in homes. I face them _here_ with no one but the blackbirds and the trees for my companions, save some rather odd Americans at the _Mittagstisch_ and _Abendessen_, and the good smiling _Dienstmädchen_ who brings me my breakfast in the morning.... I went to my bath at 6 o'clock this morning, and had the Park all to the blackbirds and myself. This was because I am expecting a certain Prof. Goldstein from Darmstadt to come to see me this morning, and I had to get the bath out of the way. He is a powerful young writer, and is translating my "Pluralistic Universe." But the weather has grown so threatening that I hope now that he won't come till next Sunday. It is a shame to converse here and not be in the open air. I would to Heaven _thou_ wert _mit_--I think thou wouldst enjoy it very much for a week or more. The German civilization is _good_! Only this place would give a very false impression of our wicked earth to a Mars-_Bewohner_ who should descend and leave and see nothing else. Not a dark spot (save what the patients' hearts individually conceal), no poverty, no vice, nothing but prettiness and simplicity of life. I snip out a concert-program (the afternoon one unusually good) which I find lying on my table. The like is given free in the open air every day. The baths weaken one so that I have little brain for reading, and must write letters to all kinds of people every day. A big quarrel is on in Paris between my would-be translators and publishers. I wish translators would let my books alone--they are written for my own people exclusively! You will have received Hewlett's delightful "Halfway House," sent to our steamer by Pauline Goldmark, I think. I have been reading a charmingly discreet life of Nietzsche by D. Halévy, and have invested in a couple more of his (N.'s) books, but haven't yet begun to read them. I am half through "Waffen-nieder!" a _first-rate_ anti-war novel by Baroness von Suttner. It has been translated, and I recommend it as in many ways instructive. How are Rebecca and Maggie [the cook and house-maid]? You don't say how you enjoy ordering the bill of fare every day. You can't vary it properly unless you make a _list_ and keep it. A good sweet dish is _rothe Grütze_, a form of fine sago consolidated by currant-jelly juice, and sauced with custard, or, I suppose, cream. Well! no more today! Give no end of love to the good boys, and to your Grandam, and believe me, ever thy affectionate, W. J. _To Henry P. Bowditch._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 4, 1910_. DEAREST HEINRICH,--The envelope in which this letter goes was addrest in Cambridge, Mass., and expected to go towards you with a letter in it, long before now. But better late than never, so here goes! I came over, as you may remember, for the double purpose of seeing my brother Henry, who had been having a sort of nervous breakdown, and of getting my heart, if possible, tuned up by foreign experts. I stayed upwards of a month with Henry, and then came hither _über_ Paris, where I stayed ten days. I have been here two and a half weeks, taking the baths, and enjoying the feeling of the strong, calm, successful, new German civilization all about me. Germany is _great_, and no mistake! But what a contrast, in the well-set-up, well-groomed, smart-looking German man of today, and his rather clumsily drest, dingy, and unworldly-looking father of forty years ago! But something of the old _Gemüthlichkeit_ remains, the friendly manners, and the disposition to talk with you and take you seriously and to respect the serious side of whatever comes along. But I can write you more interestingly of physiology than I can of sociology.... The baths may or may not arrest for a while the downward tendency which has been so marked in the past year--but at any rate it is a comfort to know that my sufferings have a respectable organic basis, and are not, as so many of my friends tell me, due to pure "nervousness." Dear Henry, you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle, of senile degeneration! I admit that the form of your tragedy beats that of that of most of us; but youth's a stuff that won't endure, in any one, and to have had it, as you and I have had it, is a good deal gained anyhow, while to see the daylight still under _any_ conditions is perhaps also better than nothing, and meanwhile the good months are sure to bring the final relief after which, "when you and I behind the veil are passed, Oh, but the long, long time the world shall last!" etc., etc. Rather gloomy moralizing, this, to end an affectionate family letter with; but the circumstances seem to justify it, and I know that you won't take it amiss. Alice is staying with Henry, but they will both be here in a fortnight or less. I find it pretty lonely all by myself, and the German language doesn't run as trippingly off the tongue as it did forty years ago. Passage back is taken for August 12th.... Well, I must stop! Pray give my love to Selma, the faithful one. Also to Fanny, Harold, and Friedel. With Harold's engagement you are more and more of a patriarch. Heaven keep you, dear Henry. Believe me, ever your affectionately sympathetic old friend, Wm. James. _To François Pillon._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 8, 1910_. MY DEAR PILLON,--I have your good letter of the 4th--which I finally had to take a magnifying-glass to read (!)--and remained full of admiration for the nervous centres which, after 80 years of work, could still guide the fingers to execute, without slipping or trembling, that masterpiece of microscopic calligraphy! Truly your nervous centres are "well preserved"--the optical ones also, in spite of the cataracts and loss of accommodation! How proud I should be if now, at the comparatively youthful age of 68, I could flatter _myself_ with the hope of doing what you have done, and living down victoriously twelve more devouring enemies of years! With a fresh volume produced, to mark each year by! I give you leave, as a garland and reward, to misinterpret my doctrine of truth _ad libitum_ and to your heart's content, in all your future writings. I will never think the worse of you for it. What you say of dear Madame Pillon awakens in me very different feelings. She has led, indeed, a life of suffering for many years, and it seems to me a real tragedy that she should now be confined to the house so absolutely. If only you might inhabit the country, where, on fine days, with no stairs to mount or descend, she could sit with flowers and trees around her! The city is not good when one is confined to one's apartment. Pray give Madame Pillon my sincerest love--I never think of her without affection--I am almost ashamed to accept year after year your "Année Philosophique," and to give you so little in return for it. I am expecting my wife and brother to arrive here from England this afternoon, and we shall _probably_ all return together through Paris, by the middle of July. I will then come and see you, with the wife, so please keep the "Année" till then, and put it into my hands. I can read nothing serious here--the baths destroy one's strength so. Whether they will do any good to my circulatory organs remains to be seen--there is no good effect perceptible so far. Believe me, dear old friend, with every message of affection to you both, yours ever faithfully, Wm. James. * * * * * The letters which follow concern Henry Adams's "Letter to American Teachers," originally printed for private circulation, but recently published, with a preface by Mr. Brooks Adams, under the title: "The Degradation of Democratic Dogma." _To Henry Adams._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 17, 1910_. DEAR HENRY ADAMS,--I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can't do it, can't impress God in that way. So far as our scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount, owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept (which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history. With this general conception as _surrounding_ everything you say in your "letter," no one can find any fault--in the present stage of scientific conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and economize recrimination. To begin with, the _amount_ of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and progress. Certain arrangements of matter _on the same energy-level_ are, from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles, while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise--in short, _make_ history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units. The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"--save that it sets a terminus--for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of _which_ rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions--their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget--being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the _ultimate_ state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium--in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully _canalisés_ that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question. There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths--so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.--It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly, Wm. James. [Illustration: Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams.] [Post-card] NAUHEIM, _June 19, 1910_. P. S. Another illustration of my meaning: The clock of the universe is running down, and by so doing makes the hands move. The energy absorbed by the hands and the _mechanical_ work they do is the same day after day, no matter how far the weights have descended from the position they were originally wound up to. The _history_ which the hands perpetrate has nothing to do with the _quantity_ of this work, but follows the _significance_ of the figures which they cover on the dial. If they move from O to XII, there is "progress," if from XII to O, there is "decay," etc. etc. W. J. _To Henry Adams._ [Post-card] CONSTANCE, _June 26, [1910]_. Yours of the 20th, just arriving, pleases me by its docility of spirit and passive subjection to philosophic opinion. Never, never pretend to an opinion of your own! that way lies every annoyance and madness! You tempt me to offer you another illustration--that of the _hydraulic ram_ (thrown back to me in an exam, as a "hydraulic goat" by an insufficiently intelligent student). Let this arrangement of metal, placed in the course of a brook, symbolize the machine of human life. It works, clap, clap, clap, day and night, so long as the brook runs _at all_, and no matter how full the brook (which symbolizes the descending cosmic energy) may be, it works always to the same effect, of raising so many kilogrammeters of water. What the _value_ of this work as history may be, depends on the uses to which the water is put in the house which the ram serves. W. J. _To Benjamin Paul Blood._ CONSTANCE, _June 25, 1910_. MY DEAR BLOOD,--About the time you will receive this, you will also be surprised by receiving the "Hibbert Journal" for July, with an article signed by me, but written mainly by yourself.[88] Tired of waiting for your final synthetic pronunciamento, and fearing I might be cut off ere it came, I took time by the forelock, and at the risk of making ducks and drakes of your thoughts, I resolved to save at any rate some of your rhetoric, and the result is what you see. Forgive! forgive! forgive! It will at any rate have made you famous, for the circulation of the H. J. is choice, as well as large (12,000 or more, I'm told), and the print and paper the best ever yet, I seem to have lost the editor's letter, or I would send it to you. He wrote, in accepting the article in May, "I have already 40 articles accepted, and some of the writers threaten lawsuits for non-publication, yet such was the exquisite refreshment Blood's writing gave me, under the cataract of sawdust in which editorially I live, that I have this day sent the article to the printer. Actions speak louder than words! Blood is simply _great_, and you are to be thanked for having dug him out. L. P. JACKS." Of course I've used you for my own purposes, and probably misused you; but I'm sure you will feel more pleasure than pain, and perhaps write again in the "Hibbert" to set yourself right. You're sure of being printed, whatever you may send. How I wish that I too could write poetry, for pluralism is in its _Sturm und Drang_ period, and verse is the only way to express certain things, I've just been taking the "cure" at Nauheim for my unlucky heart--no results so far! Sail for home again on August 12th. Address always Cambridge, Mass.; things are forwarded. Warm regards, fellow pluralist. Yours ever, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ GENEVA, _July 9, 1910_. DEAREST FLOURNOY,--Your two letters, of yesterday, and of July 4th sent to Nauheim, came this morning. I am sorry that the Nauheim one was not written earlier, since you had the trouble of writing it at all. I thank you for all the considerateness you show--you understand entirely my situation. My dyspnoea gets worse at an accelerated rate, and all I care for now is to get home--doing _nothing_ on the way. It is partly a spasmodic phenomenon I am sure, for the aeration of my tissues, judging by the color of my lips, seems to be sufficient. I will leave Geneva now without seeing you again--better not come, unless just to shake hands with my wife! Through all these years I have wished I might live nearer to you and see more of you and exchange more ideas, for we seem two men particularly well _faits pour nous comprendre_. Particularly, now, as my own intellectual house-keeping has seemed on the point of working out some good results, would it have been good to work out the less unworthy parts of it in your company. But that is impossible!--I doubt if I ever do any more writing of a serious sort; and as I am able to look upon my life rather lightly, I can truly say that "I don't care"--don't care in the least pathetically or tragically, at any rate.--I hope that Ragacz will be a success, or at any rate a wholesome way of passing the month, and that little by little you will reach your new equilibrium. Those dear daughters, at any rate, are something to live for--to show them Italy should be rejuvenating. I can write no more, my very dear old friend, but only ask you to think of me as ever lovingly yours, W. J. After leaving Geneva James rested at Lamb House for a few days before going to Liverpool to embark. Walking, talking and writing had all become impossible or painful. The short northern route to Quebec was chosen for the home voyage. When he and Mrs. James and his brother Henry landed there, they went straight to Chocorua. The afternoon light was fading from the familiar hills on August 19th, when the motor brought them to the little house, and James sank into a chair beside the fire, and sobbed, "It's so good to get home!" A change for the worse occurred within forty-eight hours and the true situation became apparent. The effort by which he had kept up a certain interest in what was going on about him during the last weeks of his journey, and a certain semblance of strength, had spent itself. He had been clinging to life only in order to get home. Death occurred without pain in the early afternoon of August 26th. His body was taken to Cambridge, where there was a funeral service in the College Chapel. After cremation, his ashes were placed beside the graves of his parents in the Cambridge Cemetery. THE END APPENDIXES APPENDIX I THREE CRITICISMS FOR STUDENTS In his smaller classes, made up of advanced students, James found it possible to comment in detail on the work of individuals. Three letters have come into the hands of the editor, from which extracts may be taken to illustrate such comments. They were written for persons with whom he could communicate only by letter, and are extended enough to suggest the _viva voce_ comments which many a student recalls, but of which there is no record. The first is from a letter to a former pupil and refers to work of Bertrand Russell and others which the pupil was studying at the time. The second and third comment on manuscripts that had been prepared as "theses" and had been submitted to James for unofficial criticism. They exhibit him, characteristically, as encouraging the student to formulate something more positive. _Jan. 26, 1908._ Those propositions or supposals which [Russell, Moore and Meinong] make the exclusive vehicles of truth are mongrel curs that have no real place between realities on the one hand and beliefs on the other. The negative, disjunctive and hypothetic truths which they so conveniently express can all, perfectly well (so far as I see), be translated into relations between beliefs and positive realities. "Propositions" are expressly devised for quibbling between realities and beliefs. They seem to have the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other, and he who uses them can straddle as he likes, owing to the ambiguity of the word _that_, which is essential to them. "_That_ Cæsar existed" is "true," sometimes means the _fact that_ be existed is real, sometimes the _belief that_ he existed is true. You can get no honest discussion out of such terms.... _Aug. 15, 1908._ Dear K----, ...[I have] read your thesis once through. I only finished it yesterday. It is a big effort, hard to grasp at a single reading, and I'm too lazy to go over it a second time in its present physically inconvenient shape. It is obvious that parts of it have been written rapidly and not boiled down; and my impression is that you have left over in it too much of the complication of form in which our ideas, our critical ideas especially, first come to us, and which has, with much rewriting, to be straightened out. You were dealing with dialecticians and logic-choppers, and you have met them on their own ground with a logic-chopping even more diseased than theirs. So far as I can see, you _have_ met them, though your own expressions are often far from lucid (--result of haste?); but in some cases I doubt whether they themselves would think that they were met at all. I fear a little that both Bradley and Royce will think that your _reductiones ad absurdum_ are too fine spun and ingenious to have real force. Too complicated, too complicated! is the verdict of my horse-like mind on much of this thesis. Your defense will be, of course, that it is a thesis, and as such, expected to be barbaric. But then I point to the careless, hasty writing of much of it. You _must_ simplify yourself, if you hope to have any influence in print. The writing becomes more careful and the style clearer, the moment you tackle Russell in the 6th part. And when you come to your own dogmatic statement of your vision of things in the last 30 pages or so, I think the thesis splendid, prophetic in tone and _very_ felicitous, often, in expression. This is indeed the _philosophie de l'avenir_, and a dogmatic expression of it will be far more effective than critical demolition of its alternatives. It will render that unnecessary if able enough. One will simply _feel_ them to be diseased. My total impression is that the critter K---- has a _really magnificent vision_ of the lay of the land in philosophy,--of the land of bondage, as well as of that of promise,--but that he has a tremendous lot of work to do yet in the way of getting himself into straight and effective literary shape. He has _elements_ of extraordinary literary power, but they are buried in much sand and shingle.... _May. 26, 1900._ Dear Miss S----, I am a caitiff! I have left your essay on my poor self unanswered.... It is a great compliment to me to be taken so philologically and importantly; and I must say that from the technical point of view you may be proud of your production. I like greatly the objective and dispassionate key in which you keep everything, and the number of subdivisions and articulations which you make gives me vertiginous admiration. Nevertheless, the tragic fact remains that I don't feel wounded at all by all that output of ability, and for reasons which I think I can set down briefly enough. It all comes, in my eyes, from too much philological method--as a Ph.D. thesis your essay is supreme, but why don't you go farther? You take utterances of mine written at different dates, for different audiences belonging to different universes of discourse, and string them together as the abstract elements of a total philosophy which you then show to be inwardly incoherent. This is splendid philology, but is it live criticism of anyone's _Weltanschauung_? Your use of the method only strengthens the impression I have got from reading criticisms of my "pragmatic" account of "truth," that the whole Ph.D. industry of building up an author's meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere, unless you have first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of imagination. That, it seems to me, you lack in my case. For instance: [Seven examples are next dealt with in two and a half pages of type-writing. These pages are omitted.] ...I have been unpardonably long; and if you were a man, I should assuredly not expect to influence you a jot by what I write. Being a woman, there may be yet a gleam of hope!--which may serve as the excuse for my prolixity. (It is not for the likes of _you_, however, to hurl accusations of prolixity!) Now if I may presume to give a word of advice to one so much more accomplished than myself in dialectic technique, may I urge, since you have shown what a superb mistress you are in that difficult art of discriminating abstractions and opposing them to each other one by one, since in short there is no university extant that wouldn't give you its _summa cum laude_,--I should certainly so reward your thesis at Harvard,--may I urge, I say, that you should now turn your back upon that academic sort of artificiality altogether, and devote your great talents to the study of reality in its concreteness? In other words, do some _positive_ work at the problem of what truth signifies, substitute a definitive alternative for the humanism which I present, as the latter's substitute. Not by proving their inward incoherence does one refute philosophies--every human being is incoherent--but only by superseding them by other philosophies more satisfactory. Your wonderful technical skill ought to serve you in good stead if you would exchange the philological kind of criticism for constructive work. I fear however that you won't--the iron may have bitten too deeply into your soul!! Have you seen Knox's paper on pragmatism in the "Quarterly Review" for April--perhaps the deepest-cutting thing yet written on the pragmatist side? On the other side read Bertrand Russell's paper in the "Edinburgh Review" just out. A thing after your own heart, but ruined in my eyes by the same kind of vicious abstractionism which your thesis shows. It is amusing to see the critics of the will to believe furnish such exquisite instances of it in their own persons. _E.g._, Russell's own splendid atheistic-titanic confession of faith in that volume of essays on "Ideals of Science and of Faith" edited by one Hand. X----, whom you quote, has recently worked himself up to the pass of being ordained in the Episcopal church.... I justify them both; for only by such experiments on the part of individuals will social man gain the evidence required. They meanwhile seem to think that the only "true" position to hold is that everything not imposed upon a will-less and non-coöperant intellect must count as false--a preposterous principle which no human being follows in real life. Well! There! that is all! But, dear Madam, I should like to know where you come from, who you are, what your present "situation" is, etc., etc.--It is natural to have some personal curiosity about a lady who has taken such an extraordinary amount of pains for me! Believe me, dear Miss S----, with renewed apologies for the extreme tardiness of this acknowledgment, yours with mingled admiration and abhorrence, WM. JAMES. APPENDIX II BOOKS BY WILLIAM JAMES The following chronological list includes books only, but it gives the essays and chapters contained in each. Professor R. B. Perry's "Bibliography" (see below) lists a great number of contributions to periodicals, which have never been reprinted, and includes notes indicative of the matter of each. (No attempt has been made to compile a list of references to literature about William James, but the following may be mentioned as easily obtainable: _William James_, by ÉMILE BOUTROUX. Paris, 1911. Translation: Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London, 1912. _La Philosophie de William James_, by THEODORE FLOURNOY. St. Blaise, 1911. Translation: _The Philosophy of William James._ Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1917.) _Literary Remains of Henry James, Sr._, with an Introduction by WILLIAM JAMES. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884. _The Principles of Psychology._ New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Macmillan & Co., 1890. _Volume I._ Scope of Psychology--Functions of the Brain--Conditions of Brain Activity--Habit--The Automaton Theory--The Mind-Stuff Theory--Methods and Snares of Psychology--Relations of Minds to Other Things--The Stream of Thought--The Consciousness of Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination and Comparison--Association--The Perception of Time--Memory. _Volume II._ Sensation--Imagination--Perception of Things--The Perception of Space--The Perception of Reality--Reasoning--The Production of Movement--Instinct--The Emotions--Will--Hypnotism--Necessary Truth and the Effects of Experience. _A Text-Book of Psychology._ Briefer Course. New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Macmillan & Co., 1892. Introductory--Sensation--Sight--Hearing--Touch--Sensations of Motion--Structure of the Brain--Functions of the Brain--Some General Conditions of Neural Activity--Habit--Stream of Consciousness--The Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination--Association--Sense of Time--Memory--Imagination--Perception--The Perception of Space--Reasoning--Consciousness and Movement--Emotion--Instinct--Will--Psychology and Philosophy. _The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy._ New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897. The Will to Believe--Is Life Worth Living?--The Sentiment of Rationality--Reflex Action and Theism--The Dilemma of Determinism--The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life--Great Men and their Environment--The Importance of Individuals--On Some Hegelisms--What Psychical Research has Accomplished. _Human Immortality, Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine._ London: Constable & Co., also Dent & Sons; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898. _The Same._ A New Edition with Preface in Reply to His Critics. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899. _Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals._ New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899. Psychology and the Teaching Art--The Stream of Consciousness--The Child as a Behaving Organism--Education and Behavior--The Necessity of Reactions--Native and Acquired Reactions--What the Native Reactions Are--The Laws of Habit--Association of Ideas--Interest--Attention--Memory--Acquisition of Ideas--Apperception--The Will. Talks to Students: The Gospel of Relaxation--On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings--What Makes Life Significant? _The Varieties of Religious Experience._ A Study in Human Nature. The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Edinburgh, 1901-1902. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902. Religion and Neurology--Circumscription of the Topic--The Reality of the Unseen--The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness--The Sick Soul--The Divided Self, and the Process of its Unification--Conversion--Saintliness--The Value of Saintliness--Mysticism--Philosophy--Other Characteristics--Conclusions--Postscript. _Pragmatism._ A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907. The Present Dilemma in Philosophy--What Pragmatism Means--Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered--The One and the Many--Pragmatism and Common Sense--Pragmatism's Conception of Truth--Pragmatism and Humanism--Pragmatism and Religion. _A Pluralistic Universe._ Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. The Types of Philosophic Thinking--Monistic Idealism--Hegel and his Method--Concerning Fechner--Compounding of Consciousness--Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism--The Continuity of Experience--Conclusions---- Appendixes: _A._ The Thing and its Relations. _B._ The Experience of Activity. _C._ On the Notion of Reality as Changing. _The Meaning of Truth._ A Sequel to _Pragmatism_. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. The Function of Cognition--The Tigers in India--Humanism and Truth--The Relation between Knower and Known--The Essence of Humanism--A Word More about Truth--Professor Pratt on Truth--The Pragmatist Account of Truth and its Misunderstanders--The Meaning of the Word Truth--The Existence of Julius Cæsar--The Absolute and the Strenuous Life--Hébert on Pragmatism--Abstractionism and "Relativismus"--Two English Critics--A Dialogue. _Some Problems of Philosophy._ A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911. Philosophy and its Critics--The Problems of Metaphysics--The Problem of Being--Percept and Concept--The One and the Many--The Problem of Novelty--Novelty and the Infinite--Novelty and Causation---- Appendix: Faith and the Right to Believe. _Memories and Studies._ New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911. Louis Agassiz--Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord--Robert Gould Shaw--Francis Boott--Thomas Davidson--Herbert Spencer's Autobiography--Frederick Myers's Services to Psychology--Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher--On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake--The Energies of Men--The Moral Equivalent of War--Remarks at the Peace Banquet--The Social Value of the College-bred--The Ph.D. Octopus--The True Harvard--Stanford's Ideal Destiny--A Pluralistic Mystic (B. P. Blood). _Essays in Radical Empiricism._ Edited by RALPH BARTON PERRY. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912. Introduction--Does Consciousness Exist?--A World of Pure Experience--The Thing and its Relations--How Two Minds can Know One Thing--The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience--The Experience of Activity--The Essence of Humanism--_La Notion de Conscience_--Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?--Mr. Pitkin's Refutation of Radical Empiricism--Humanism and Truth Once More--Absolutism and Empiricism. _Collected Essays and Reviews._ Edited by _Ralph Barton Perry_. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920. Review of E. Sargent's _Planchette_ (1869)--Review of G. H. Lewes's _Problems of Life and Mind_ (1875)--Review entitled "German Pessimism" (1875)--Chauncey Wright (1875)--Review of "Bain and Renouvier" (1876)--Review of Renan's _Dialogues_ (1876)--Review of G. H. Lewes's _Physical Basis of Mind_ (1877)--Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence (1878)--Quelques Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective (1878)--The Sentiment of Rationality (1879)--Review (unsigned) of W. K. Clifford's _Lectures and Essays_ (1879)--Review of Herbert Spencer's _Data of Ethics_ (1879)--The Feeling of Effort (1880)--The Sense of Dizziness in Deaf Mutes (1882)--What is an Emotion? (1884)--Review of Royce's _The Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ (1885)--The Consciousness of Lost Limbs (1887)--Réponse de W. James aux Remarques de M. Renouvier sur sa théorie de la volonté (1888)--The Psychological Theory of Extension (1889)--A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science (1892)--The Original Datum of Space Consciousness (1893)--Mr. Bradley on Immediate Resemblance (1893)--Immediate Resemblance--Review of G. T. Ladd's _Psychology_ (1894)--The Physical Basis of Emotion (1894)--The Knowing of Things Together (1895)--Review of W. Hirsch's _Genie und Entartung_ (1895)--Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results (1898)--Review of R. Hodgson's _A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance_ (1898)--Review of Sturt's _Personal Idealism_ (1903)--The Chicago School (1904)--Review of F. C. S. Schiller's _Humanism_ (1904)--Laura Bridgman (1904)--G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy (1906)--The Mad Absolute (1906)--Controversy about Truth with John E. Russell (1907)--Report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson Control; Conclusion (1909)--Bradley or Bergson? (1910)--A Suggestion about Mysticism (1910). _A List of the Published Writings of William James_, with notes, and an index; by RALPH BARTON PERRY. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920. INDEX THROUGHOUT the index the initial =J.= stands for William James. In the list of references to his own writings, arranged alphabetically at the end of the entries under his name, the titles of separate papers are set in roman and quoted, those of volumes in italics. The words "See Contents" under a name indicate that letters addressed to the person in question are to be sought in the Table of Contents, where all letters are listed. Abauzit, F., =1=, 145, =2=, 185. Abbot, F. E., _Scientific Theism_, =1=, 247. Absolute, Philosophy of the, =1=, 238. Absolute Unity, =1=, 231. Académie Française, =2=, 338. Académie des Sciences Morales, et Politiques, =J.= a corresponding member of, =2=, 75; =J.= an _associé étranger_ of, 328, 319, 338. Adams, Brooks, =2=, 343. Adams, Henry, _Letter to American Teachers_, =2=, 343 _ff._; mentioned, 10. _See Contents._ Adirondack range, =1=, 194, 195. Adirondacks. _See_ Keene Valley. Adler, Waldo, =2=, 75, 76, 163. Æsthetics, Study of, and Art, =2=, 87. Agassiz, Alexander, =1=, 31. Agassiz, Louis, =J.= joins his Brazilian expedition, =1=, 54 _ff._, =J.= quoted on, 55; quoted, on =J.=, 56; on the Brazilian expedition, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 68, 69; described by =J.=, 65, 66; centenary of, =2=, 287, 288; mentioned, =1=, 34, 35, 37, 4=2=, 47, 48, 72, =2=, 2. Agassiz, Mrs. Louis, her 80th birthday, =2=, 180 and _n._, 181; mentioned, =1=, 60, 65, 67. _See Contents_. Aguinaldo, Emilio, =2=, 148. Alcott, A. Bronson, =1=, 18 _n._ Allen, John A., =1=, 74. Amalfi, Sorrento to, =2=, 22=1=, 222. Amazon, the, Agassiz's expedition to. _See_ Brazil. America, general aspect of the country, =1=, 346, 347 and _n._ And _see_ United States. American Philosophical Association, =2=, 163, 164, 300. Americans, in Germany, =1=, 87. Angell, James R., =1=, 345, =2=, 14. Anglican Church, =2=, 305. Anglicanism and Romanism, =2=, 305. Anglophobia in U. S. revealed by Venezuela incident, =2=, 27, 31, 32. Annunzio, Gabriele d', =2=, 63. "Anti-pragmatisme," =2=, 319. Aristotle, =1=, 283. _Aristotelian Society Proceedings_, =2=, 207. Arnim, Gisela von. _See_ Grimm, Mrs. Herman. Ashburner, Anne, =1=, 179, 181, 315. Ashburner, Grace, =1=, 181, 315. _See Contents_. Ashfield, annual dinner at, =2=, 199. Athens, =2=, 224, 225. And _see_ Parthenon, the. Atkinson, Charles, =1=, 35. Ausable Lakes, =1=, 194. Austria, political conditions in (1867), =1=, 95. Avenarius, =2=, 301. Baginsky, Dr., =1=, 214. Bain, Alexander, =1=, 143, 164. Bakewell, Charles M., =2=, 14, 81, 85, 120, 248. Baldwin, James M., =2=, 20. Baldwin, William, =1=, 337. Balfour, A. J., _Foundations of Belief_, =2=, 20. Balzac, Honoré de, =1=, 106, =2=, 265. Bancroft, George, =1=, 107, 109. Bancroft, Mrs. George, =1=, 135. Bancroft, John C., =1=, 70. Baring Bros., =1=, 73. Barber, Catherine, marries William James I, =1=, 4; her ancestry, 4 and _n._ And _see_ James, Mrs. Catherine (Barber). Barber, Francis, =1=, 5. Barber, Jannet, =1=, 4 _n._ Barber, John, =J.='s great-grandfather, in the Revolutionary army, =1=, 4 and _n._; H. James, Senior, on, 5. Barber, Mrs. John, =1=, 5. Barber, Patrick, =1=, 4 _n._ Barber family, the, =1=, 4, 5. Bashkirtseff, Marie, Diary of, =1=, 307, =2=, 148. Bastien-Lepage, Jules, =1=, 210 and _n._ "Bay." _See_ Emmet, Ellen. Bayard, Thomas F., =2=, 27 _n._ Beers, Clifford W., _A Mind that Found Itself_, =2=, 273, 274 and _n._ _See Contents_. Beethoven, Ludwig von, _Fidelio_, =1=, 112. Belgium, philosophers in, =1=, 216. Benn, A. W., =1=, 333, 334. Berenson, Bernhard, =2=, 138. Bergson, Henri, _Matière et Mémoire_, =2=, 178, 179; his system, 179; =J.='s enthusiasm for, 179, 180 _n._; _L'Evolution Créatrice_, 290 _ff._; _Le Rire_, 329; mentioned, 17=2=, 226, 257, 314, 315. _See Contents._ Berkeley, Sir W., _Principles_, =2=, 179. Berlin, =1=, 100, 105, 106, 11=2=, 122. Berlin, University of, =1=, 118, 120, 121. Bernard, Claude, =1=, 72, 156. Bhagavat-Gita, the, =2=, 238. Bible, the, and orthodox theology, =2=, 196. Bielshowski, A., _Life of Goethe_, =2=, 262. Bigelow, Henry J., =1=, 72. Bigelow, W., Sturgis, =2=, 10. Birukoff, _Life of Tolstoy_, =2=, 262. Black, W., _Strange Adventures of a Phaeton_, =1=, 173. Blood, Benjamin Paul, _The Flaw in Supremacy_, =2=, 39; J.'s article on, in _Hibbert Journal_, 39 _n._, 347, 348; his _Anæsthetic Revolution_ reviewed by =J.=, 40 and _n._; his strictures on =J.='s English, 59; mentioned, 22, 338, 339. _See Contents._ Bôcher, Ferdinand, =1=, 337. Boer War, the, =2=, 118, 140. Bonn-am-Rhein, =1=, 20. Boott, Elizabeth (Mrs. Frank Duveneck), =1=, 153, 155. Boott, Francis, J.'s commemorative address on, =1=, 153; mentioned, 155, 341 _n._, =2=, 191. _See Contents._ Bornemann, Fraülein, =1=, 116, 135. Bosanquet, B., quoted, =2=, 126. Boston _Journal_, =2=, 329. Boston _Transcript_, J.'s letter to, on Medical License bill, =2=, 68-70; 72 and _n._, 124, 125. Boulogne, Collège de, =1=, 20. Bourget, Paul, _Idylle Tragique_, =2=, 37; and Tolstoy, 37, 38; mentioned, =1=, 348. Bourget, Mme. Paul, =1=, 348. Bourkhardt, James, =1=, 64, 70. Bourne, Ansel, =1=, 294. Boutroux, Émile, =2=, 314, 33=2=, 335, 337, 338. Bowditch, Henry I., =1=, 124. Bowditch, Henry P., =1=, 7=1=, 10=2=, 138, 139, 149, 167, 169, 195. _See Contents._ Bowen, Francis, =1=, 53. Boyd, Harriet A. (Mrs. C. H. Hawes), =2=, 223, 224. Bradley, Francis H., _Logic_, =1=, 258; mentioned, =2=, 142, 208, 216, 271, 272, 281, 282. Brazil, Agassiz's expedition to, =1=, 54 _ff._; letters written by =J.=, 56-70; recalled, on Mrs. Agassiz's 80th birthday, =2=, 181. Brazilians, the, =1=, 59, 66. Brighton (England) Aquarium, =1=, 287. British Guiana, =2=, 26. British intellectuality, =1=, 270. Brown-Séquard, Charles E., =1=, 71. Browning, Robert, "A Grammarian's Funeral," =1=, 129, 130; mentioned, =2=, 123. Bruno, Giordano, inscription on statue of, =2=, 139, Bryce, James, =1=, 303, 345, =2=, 65, 298, 299. Bryce, Mrs. James, =2=, 298, 299. Bryn Mawr College, =2=, 120, 121. Bull, Mrs. Ole, =2=, 144. Bunch, a dog, =1=, 183. Burkhardt, Jacob, _Renaissance in Italy_, =1=, 176. Busse, _Leib und Seele, Geist and Körper_, =2=, 237 and _n._ Butler, Joseph, _Analogy_, =1=, 189. Butler, Samuel, =1=, 283. Cabot, J. Elliot, =1=, 204. Caird, Edward, =1=, 205, 305. California, impressions of, =2=, 82. California, Northern, =2=, 80. California, University of, =2=, 5. California Champagne, Gift of, =1=, 291. Canadian Pacific Ry., =2=, 80. Carlyle, "Jenny," =2=, 192. Carlyle, Thomas, and H. James, Senior, compared, =1=, 241; mentioned, 220. Carnegie, Andrew, =2=, 18. Carpenter, William B., =1=, 143. Carqueiranne, Château de, =2=, 114. Carrington, Hereward, =2=, 327. Cams, Karl G., =1=, 96. Casey, Silas, =1=, 155. Castle Malwood, =2=, 160. Catholic Church, =J.='s attitude toward, =1=, 296, 297. Catholics, "concrete," differentiated from their church, =1=, 297. Cattell, J. M., quoted, =1=, 300; mentioned, =2=, 32. Census of Hallucinations in America, conducted by =J.=, =1=, 228, 229, =2=, 50. Chamberlain, Joseph, =1=, 303. Chambers, Dr., _Clinical Lectures_, =1=, 150. Chanzy, Antoine E. A., =1=, 160. Chapman, John J., _Practical Agitation_, =2=, 124; _Political Nursery_, 128; mentioned, 125, 329. _See Contents._ Chapman, Mrs. John J., =2=, 256. Charmes, Francis, =2=, 320. Chatrian, L. G. C. A. _See_ Erckmann-Chatrian. Chautauqua, =J.='s lectures at, and impressions of, =2=, 40 _ff._ Chesterton, Gilbert K., _Heretics_, =2=, 241, 260; mentioned, 257 and =n.=, 330. Chicago, anarchist riot in, and English newspapers, =1=, 252. Chicago University, School of Thought, =2=, 201, 202. Child, Francis J., death of, =2=, 52; mentioned, =1=, 51, 169, 195, 291, 315 and _n._, 317. _See Contents._ Child, Mrs. F. J., =1=, 51, 197, =2=, 52. Chocorua, =J.='s summer home at, =1=, 267, 268; life at, 271, 272; =J.='s life ends at, =2=, 350; =1=, 261, 323. Christian Scientists, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68, 69. Christian Theology, position with reference to, =2=, 213, 214. Clairvoyance. _See_ Psychic phenomena. Claparède, Edward, =2=, 226, 227, 323. Clark University, =2=, 327. Clarke, Joseph Thatcher, =2=, 130. Clemens, Samuel L. _See_ Twain, Mark. Cleveland, Grover, his Venezuela Message, and its reaction on =J.=, =2=, 26 _ff._, 31, 32, 33, =2=, 285. Clifford, W. K., =2=, 218. Club, the, =2=, 9, 10. Colby, F. M., =2=, 264. Collier, Robert J. F., =2=, 264. Colorado Springs, summer school at, =2=, 24. Columbia Faculty Club, =J.='s talks at, =2=, 265 and _n._ Columbia University, =2=, 332. Columbus, Christopher, and Dr. Bowditch, =1=, 124. Common sense, =2=, 198. Concord, Mass., Emerson centenary at, =2=, 194. Concord Summer School of Philosophy, =1=, 230, 255. Congress of the U. S., and the Spanish War, =2=, 73, 74. Coniston, Ruskin Museum at, =2=, 306. Continent, the, and England, contrasts between, =2=, 152, 305. Conversion, =2=, 57. Correggio, Antonio de, his Shepherds' Adoration, =1=, 90; and Rafael, 90. Corruption, in Europe and America, =2=, 101. Courtelines, G., _Les Marionettes de la Vie_, =2=, 336. Courtier, M., =2=, 327. Cousin, Victor, =1=, 117. Crafts, James W., =2=, 10. Cranch, Christopher P., =1=, 131. _Critique Philosophique_, =1=, 188, 207. Crothers, Samuel M., =2=, 262. Cuba, and the Spanish War, =2=, 73, 74. Danriac, Lionel, =2=, 45, 203. Dante Alighieri, =1=, 331. Darwin, Charles R., =1=, 225. Darwin, Mrs. W. E. (Sara Sedgwick), =1=, 76, 179, =2=, 152. Darwin, William E., =2=, 152. Darwin, William Leonard, =2=, 276. Daudet, Alphonse, =2=, 168. Davidson. Thomas, =J.='s essay on, =2=, 107 _n._; =J.= lectures at his summer school, 197, 199; mentioned, =1=, 192, 202, 204, 249, 255, =2=, 156. _See Contents._ Davis, Jefferson, =1=, 66, 67. Death, reflections concerning, =2=, 154. Delboeuf, J., =1=, 216, 217. Demoniacal possession, =2=, 56, 57. Derby, Richard, =1=, 122. Descartes, René C., =1=, 188, =2=, 13. Determinism, =1=, 245, 246. Dewey, John, _Beliefs and Realities_, =2=, 245, 246; mentioned, 202, 257. _See Contents._ Dexter, Newton, =1=, 68, 73. Dibblee, Anita, =2=, 82, 84. Dibblee, B. H., =2=, 82. Dibblee, Mrs., =2=, 82, 84. Dickinson, G. Lowes, _Justice and Liberty_, =2=, 317, 318. Diderot, Denis, _OEuvres Choisis_, =1=, 106, 107; mentioned, 142. Dilthey, W., =1=, 109, 110, 111. Divonne, =1=, 137, 138. Dixwell, Epes S., =1=, 124. Dixwell, Fanny, =1=, 76 and _n._ And _see_ Holmes, Mrs. Fanny Dixwell. Dooley, Mr. _See_ Dunne, Finley P. Dorr, George B., =2=, 255. Dorrs, the, =2=, 63. Dresden, =1=, 86, 9=2=, 93, 104. Dresden Gallery, =1=, 90. Dreyfus Case, the, =2=, 89, 97 _ff._, 102. Driesch, Hans, _Gifford Lectures_, =2=, 323. Driver, Dr., =2=, 118. Du Bois, W. E. B., _The Souls of Black Folk_, =2=, 196 and _n._ Du Bois-Raymond, Emil, =1=, 121. Dudevant, Mme. Aurore. _See_ Sand, George. Du Maurier, George, _Peter Ibbetson_, =1=, 318. Dunne, Finley P., =2=, 94, 264. Durham, =2=, 306, 307. Duveneck, Frank, =1=, 153, 337 and _n._, 341. Duveneck, Mrs. Frank. _See_ Boott, Elizabeth. Dwight, Thomas, =1=, 97, 98, 122, 124, 165, 166, 170. Edinburgh, praise of, =2=, 146, 147, 150; social amenities in, 147, 148. Education, importance of, =1=, 119. Eliot, Charles W., quoted, on =J.= in Scientific School, =1=, 31, 32 and _n._; on J. Wyman, 47, 48; on courses given by =J.=, =2=, 4 _n._; mentioned, =1=, 35, 165, 166, 202, 262, =2=, 3, 15, 86, 137, 266. Eliot, George, _Daniel Deronda_, =1=, 185. Elliot, Gertrude, =2=, 263. Elliot, John W., =2=, 129. Elliot, Mrs. John W. (Mary Morse), =1=, 197, 199, =2=, 129. Ellis, Rufus, =1=, 192. Emerson, Edward W., on H. James, Senior, =1=, 17, 18 and _n._; mentioned, 33. Emerson, Mary Moody, and H. James, Senior, =1=, 18 _n._ Emerson, Ralph Waldo, letters of H. James, Senior, to, quoted, =1=, 11; centenary of, =2=, 187, 190, 193, 194 (=J.='s address at); "the divine," 190, 191; his devotion to truth, 190; _Representative Men_, 192, 193; and Santayana, 234, 235; mentioned, =1=, 9, 18 _n._, 125, =2=, 23, 196, 197. Emmet, Ellen, =1=, 316, =2=, 61, 82, 83, 84. _See Contents._ Emmet, Mrs. Temple (Ellen Temple), =2=, 64. Emmet, Rosina H., =2=, 38, 61, 62, 64. _See Contents._ Emmet, Temple, =2=, 61. Empiricism, =1=, 152. And _see_ Radical Empiricism. England, in 1871, =1=, 161; gardens in, 288; impressions of, in 1901, =2=, 152; contrasted with Continental countries, 152, 305; and the U. S., 304, 305; changes in, 307; high state of civilization in, 307, 308. English, in Germany, =1=, 87. English language, the teaching of the, =1=, 341. English newspapers, and the anarchist riot in Chicago, =1=, 252; attitude of, on Venezuela Message, =2=, 33; mentioned, 125, 126. English people, one aspect of the greatness of, =1=, 288. English social and political system, =1=, 232, 233. Erb, Dr., =2=, 128. Erckmann (Émile)-Chatrian (L. G. C. A.), _L'Ami Fritz_, =1=, 101; _Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette_, 101; _Histoire d'un Sous-Maître_, 162; mentioned, 106, 136. Erdmann, Johann E., =1=, 345. Erie Canal, the, =1=, 3. _Essays Philosophical and Philological in Honor of William James_, =2=, 309, 310. Esterhazy M. (Dreyfus case), =2=, 98, 100. Evans, Mrs. Glendower. _See Contents._ Evans, Mary Anne. _See_ Eliot, George. Everett, Charles Carroll, =1=, 202, =2=, 156. Everett, William, =1=, 51. Experience, The philosophy of, =2=, 184, 185, 187. Faidherbe, Louis L. C., =1=, 160. Fairchild, Sally, =2=, 205. Faith-curers, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68, 69, 70, 71. Farlow, William G., =1=, 71. Fechner, Gustav T., _Zend-Avesta_, =2=, 300, 309; mentioned, =1=, 160, =2=, 269, 318. Fichte, Johann G., =1=, 141, =2=, 293. Field, Kate, _Washington_, =1=, 308. _Figaro_, =2=, 97, 99. Fischer, Kuno, Essay on Lessing's _Nathan der Weise_, =1=, 94; _Hegel's Leben, Werke und Lehre_, =2=, 134, 135, 138. Fiske, John, death of, =2=, 156, 157; _Cosmic Philosophy_, =2=, 233; mentioned, =1=, 347, =2=, 10. Fitz, Reginald H., =1=, 162. Flaubert, Gustave, _Madame Bovary_, =2=, 291; mentioned, =1=, 182. Fletcher, Horace, =2=, 254. Flint, Austin, =1=, 167. Florence, Boboli Garden, =1=, 177; 180, 181, 328 _ff._, 340, 342. Flournoy, Theodore, _William James_, =1=, 145 and _n._; beginnings of =J.='s friendship with, 320; _Métaphysique et Psychologie_, =2=, 25; on religious psychology, 185; reviews Myers's _Human Personality_, 185; lectures on pragmatism, 267; mentioned, 129, 172, 180 _n._, 227, 228, 315. His children referred to: Alice, =2=, 129, 241, 242; Ariane-Dorothée, 129; Henri, 186, 187; Marguerite, 129. _See Contents._ Flournoy, Mme. Theodore, =1=, 325, 326, =2=, 23, 25, 46, 48, 53, 55, 129, 187, 310, 313. Foote, Henry W., =1=, 111, 112, 113, 153. Forbes, W. Cameron, =2=, 297. _See Contents._ Forbes-Robertson, J., =2=, 263. Fouillée, Alfred, Renouvier's articles on, =1=, 231; mentioned, 324. France, and Prussia (1867), =1=, 95; religious and revolutionary parties in, 161, 162; influence of Catholic education in, 162; and the Dreyfus case, =2=, 89; decadence of, 105, 106. France, Anatole, =2=, 63. Francis of Assisi, St., =2=, 142. Francis Joseph, Emperor, =1=, 88. Franco-Prussian War, =J.='s views on, =1=, 159, 160, 161. Frazer, J. G., =2=, 139. Free will, influence on =J.= of Renouvier's writings on, =1=, 147, 164, 165, 169; and determinism, 186; S. H, Hodgson's paper on, 244, 245. French language, =1=, 341. Freud, Sigmund, =2=, 327, 328. Galileo, =2=, 1 =n.= Galileo anniversary at Padua, =1=, 333. Gardiner, H. N., =2=, 163. _See Contents._ Gardner, Mrs. John L., =2=, 205. Garibaldi, statue of, =2=, 139. Gautier, Théophile, =1=, 106. Geneva, "Academy" of, =1=, 20, =2=, 187; Museum at, 21. German art, =1=, 105. German character, =1=, 126. German education, =1=, 121. German essayists, discussed, =1=, 94, 95. German genius, its massiveness, =2=, 176. German language, =J.='s progress in learning, =1=, 87, 101, 108, 116, 121; mentioned, 87, 88, 89, 92, 341. German motto, the, =1=, 213. German universities, and Harvard, =1=, 217, 218 and _n._ Germans, =J.='s opinion of, =1=, 100, 101, 121, 122, =2=, 104. Germany, =J.='s impressions of, =1=, 86, 105; peasant-women in, 211; philosophers in, 216, 217; in 1910, =2=, 341. Gibbens, Alice H., early life, =1=, 192; marries =J.=, 192. And _see_ James, Mrs. William. Gibbens, Mrs. E. P., =1=, 192, 222, 247, 248, 260, 339, =2=, 118. _See Contents._ Gibbens, Margaret, =1=, 248, 260, 279, 28=1=, 318. And _see_ Gregor, Mrs. Leigh R. _See Contents._ Gibbens, Mary, marries W. M. Salter, =1=, 248. Gifford Lectures. _See_ this title under James, William, Works of. Gilman, Daniel Coit, =1=, 202, 203. Gizycki, Herr von, =1=, 214, 248. Gladstone, William E., =2=, 31. Glenmore, Davidson's summer school of philosophy at, =2=, 197 _n._, 199. God, conceptions of, =2=, 211, 213, 269, 270. Goddard, George A., =1=, 274. Godkin, E. L., Life of, quoted, =1=, 17, 115 _n._; =J.='s opinion of, 284, 285; _Comments and Reflections_, =2=, 30; illness of, 160, 161; his death, 181; proposed memorial to, 18=1=, 182; his home life and his "life against the world," 182; mentioned, =1=, 118, 239, =2=, 167. _See Contents._ Godkin, Mrs. E. L., =1=, 240, 241, =2=, 30, 167. Godkin, Lawrence, =2=, 30. Goethe, Johann W. von, quoted, =1=, 54; _Italienische Reise_, 91; Vischer on Faust, 94; _Gedichte_, =2=, 176; mentioned, =1=, 104, 107. Goldmark, Charles, =2=, 75, 77. Goldmark, Josephine, =2=, 215. Goldmark, Pauline, =2=, 75, 76, 94. _See Contents._ Goldmarks, the, =2=, 275. Goldstein, Julius, =2=, 339. Goodwin, William W., =1=, 51. Gordon, George A., =1=, 277. Grand Canyon of Arizona, =2=, 238, 239. Grandfather Mountain, =1=, 316, 317. Grant, Sir Ludovic, =2=, 144. Grant, Percy, =2=, 262. Grant, Ulysses S., =1=, 155. Gray, John C., Jr., =1=, 102, 127, 154, 155, 168, 169, =2=, 9, 10, 288. _See Contents._ Gray, Roland, =2=, 109. Great Britain, and Venezuela, =2=, 26, 27; and the Boer War, 140, 141. And _see_ England. Greeks, the, =2=, 225. Green, St. John, =2=, 233. Greene, T. H., =2=, 237. Gregor, Mrs. Leigh R. (Margaret Gibbens), =1=, 338, =2=, 106. And _see_ Gibbens, Margaret. Gregor, Rosamund, =2=, 275 and _n._ Grimm, Herman, his _Unüberwindliche Mächte_, reviewed by =J.=, =1=, 103, 104 and _n._; his arrant moralism, 104; "suckled by Goethe," 104; J. dines with, 109 _ff._; his costume, 110; on Homer, 111; mentioned, 107, 108, 125. Grimm, Mrs. Herman (Gisela von Arnim), =1=, 111, 116. Grimm Brothers, =1=, 107, 110. Grinnell, Charles E., =2=, 10. Gryon, Switzerland, =1=, 321, 322. Gurney, Edmund, _Phantasms of the Living_, =1=, 267; his death, 279; =J.='s regard for, 280 and _n._; mentioned, 222, 229 _n._, 242, 25=1=, 255, =2=, 30. Gurney, Mrs. Edmund, =1=, 279, 287. Gurney, Ephraim W., =1=, 76 _n._, 151. Gurney, Mrs. Ephraim W. (Ellen Hooper), =1=, 76 _n._ Habit, Chapter on, in the _Psychology_, =1=, 297. Halévy, Daniel, _Vie de Nietzsche_, =2=, 336, 340. Hall, G. Stanley, quoted, =1=, 188, 189, 307; his new Journal, =2=, 210, 217; mentioned, =1=, 255, 269, =2=, 327. Hallucinations, Census of. _See_ Census. Hamilton, Alexander, =1=, 5. Hamilton, Sir W., =1=, 189. Hampton Court, =1=, 287. Hapgood, Norman, =2=, 264. Harris, Frank, _The Man Shakespeare_, =2=, 330, 335, 336. Harris, William T., =1=, 201, 202, 204. Hartmann, Karl R. E. von, =1=, 19=1=, =2=, 293. Harvard Medical School, in the sixties, =1=, 71 _ff._; and the Medical License Bill, =2=, 67. Harvard Psychological Laboratory, beginning of, =1=, 179 _n._; Münsterberg in charge of, 301, 302. Harvard Summer School, =2=, 4. Harvard University, beginning of =J.='s service in, =1=, 165; courses in philosophy offered by, 191; Hegelism at, 208; contrasted with German universities, 217, 218 and _n._; Department of Philosophy, =J.= on the future of, 317, 318; =J.='s new courses at, =2=, 3, 4; routine business of professors, 45 and _n._; a possible genuine philosophic universe at, 122; confers LL.D. on =J.=, 173 and _n._; =J.= resigns professorship at, 220, 266 and _n._; Roosevelt as possible President of, 232 and _n._ Havens, Kate, =1=, 85 _n._ Hawthorne Julian, _Bressant_, =1=, 167. Hay, John, =1=, 251. Hegel, Georg W. F., _Aesthetik_, =1=, 87; mentioned, 202, 205, 208, 305. Hegelianism (Hegelism), at Harvard, =1=, 208; in the _Psychology_, 304 and _n._, 305; mentioned, =2=, 237. Hegelians, =1=, 205. Heidelberg, =1=, 137. Helmholtz, H. L. F. von, _Optics_, =1=, 266; mentioned, 72, 119, 123, 137, 224, 225, 347. Helmholtz, Frau von, =1=, 347. Henderson, Gerard C., =2=, 275. Henry, Joseph, =1=, 7. Henry, Colonel (Dreyfus case), =2=, 98. Herder, Johann G. von, =1=, 141. Hering, Ewald, =1=, 212. Hewlett, Maurice, _Halfway House_, =2=, 340. Heymans, G., _Einführung in die Metaphysik_, =2=, 237 and _n._ Hibbert Foundation lectures (Manchester College), =2=, 283, 284. _Hibbert Journal_, =2=, 313, 348, Higginson, Henry L., takes charge of =J.='s patrimony, =1=, 233; and the Harvard Union, =2=, 108 and _n._; mentioned, 9, 10, 18=1=, 19=1=, 26=1=, 287, 329. _See Contents._ Higginson, James J., =1=, 102, 127. Higginson, Storrow, =1=, 35. Higginson, T. W., =2=, 191. Hildreth, J. L., =1=, 275, 277. Hildreth, Mrs. J. L., =1=, 276. Hoar, George F., =2=, 191. Hobhouse, L. T., and "The Will to Believe," =2=, 207, 209; mentioned, 282. _See Contents._ Hodder, Alfred, =2=, 14. Hodges, George, =2=, 276, Hodgson, Richard, death of, =2=, 242, 258; his work and character, 242; and Mrs. Piper, 242; =J.= investigates Mrs. Piper's claim to give communications from his spirit, 286, 287; =J.='s report thereon, 317, 319, 324; mentioned, =1=, 228, 229 _n._, 254, 281. Hodgson, Shadworth H., "Time and Space," =1=, 188; "Theory of Practice," 188; "Philosophy and Experience," and "Dialogue on the Will," 243-245; mentioned, 143, 191, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 222. _See Contents._ Höffding, Harold, =2=, 216. Holland, Mrs. _See_ Mediums. Holmes, O. W., =1=, 71. Holmes, O. W., Jr., =1=, 60, 73, 76, 80, 154, 155, =2=, 10, 51. _See Contents._ Holmes, Mrs. O. W., Jr. (Fanny Dixwell), her "panel" and its inscription, =2=, 156 and _n._, 157. Holt, Edwin B., =2=, 234. Holt, Henry, =2=, 18. _See Contents._ Holt, Henry, & Co., J. contracts to write volume on Psychology for, =1=, 194. Homer, =1=, 111. Hooper, Edward W., =2=, 156. Hooper, Ellen, =1=, 76 and _n._ Hooper, Ellen (Mrs. John Potter), =2=, 275. Hooper, Louisa, =2=, 275. Hopkins, Woolsey R., describes accident to H. James, Senior, =1=, 7, 8. Horace Mann Auditorium, =2=, 17. Horse-swapping, =1=, 271. House of Commons, =1=, 345, 346. Howells, W. D., _Indian Summer_, =1=, 253; _Shadow of a Dream_, 298; _Hazard of New Fortunes_, 298, 299; _Rise of Silas Lapham_, 307; _Minister's Charge_, 307, 308; _Lemuel Barker_, 308; _Criticism and Fiction_, 308; mentioned, =1=, 158, =2=, 10. _See Contents._ Howells, Mrs. W. D., =1=, 253, 298, 299. Howison, George H., =1=, 239 _n._, 304, =2=, 78. _See Contents._ Hugo, Victor, _Les Misérables_, =1=, 263; _La Légende des Siècles_, =2=, 63; mentioned, =1=, 90, =2=, 51. Huidekoper, Rosamund, =2=, 275. Humanism, =2=, 245, 282. Humboldt, H. A. von, _Travels_, =1=, 62. Humboldt, W., letters of, =1=, 141. Hume, David, =1=, 187, =2=, 18, 123, 165. Hunnewell, Walter, =1=, 68. Hunt, William M., =1=, 24. Hunter, Ellen (Temple), =2=, 258, 262. Huxley, Thomas H., =J.= quoted on, =1=, 226 _n._; his _Life and Letters_, 226 _n._, =2=, 248; mentioned, =2=, 218. Hyatt, Alpheus, =1=, 31. Hyslop, James H., =2=, 242, 287. Ideal, the, =1=, 238. Idealism, Absolute, Royce's argument for, =1=, 242. Immortality, =1=, 310, =2=, 214, 287. Imperialism, =2=, 74. Indians, in Brazil, =1=, 66, 67, 70. Indifferentism, =1=, 238. Insane, proposed national society to improve condition of, =2=, 273, 274. Intellectualism, =2=, 291, 292. Italian language, =1=, 341, =2=, 222. Italy, =1=, 175, 180, 181. Jacks, L. P., =2=, 339, 348. Jackson Henry, =1=, 274, 275. Jacobi, Friedrich H., =1=, 141. James, Alexander R. (=J.='s son), =2=, 37, 43, 92. _See Contents._ James, Alice (=J.='s sister), her diary quoted, =1=, 16; in England with H. James, Jr., from 1885 on, 258; her illness, 258, 259, 284; her diary quoted, 259 _n._; quoted, on =J.='s European trip in 1889, 289, 290; her death, 319; mentioned, 18, 47, 60, 69, 91, 103, 142, 172, 183, 217, 220, 281, 285, 286, =2=, 127. _See Contents._ James, Mrs. Catherine (Barber), third wife of W. James I, (=J.='s paternal grandmother), "a dear gentle lady," =1=, 6; her house in Albany, 105; mentioned, 4, 5 _n._, 7. James, Garth Wilkinson (=J.='s brother), wounded at Fort Wagner, =1=, 43, 44, 49; mentioned, =1=, 17, 33, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 51, 52, 60, 69, 70, 88, 135 _n._, 136, 192. James, Henry, Senior (=J.='s father), quoted, on his father, =1=, 4, his grandfather, 5, and his mother, 5 and _n._; his habit of thought expressed in his description of his mother, 5 _n._; sketch of his life and character, 7-19; maimed for life by accident, 7, 8; his discontent with orthodox dispensation, 8; marries Mary Walsh, 8; =J.='s striking resemblance to, 10; relations with his children, 10, 18, 19; =J.='s introduction to his _Literary Remains_, 10, 13; letters of, to Emerson, 11; effect of Swedenborg's works on, 12; the only business of his later life, 1=2=, 13; =J.='s estimate of, 13; Henry James quoted on, 14; letter of, to editor of _New Jerusalem Messenger_, 14-16; his directions regarding his funeral service, 16; Godkin quoted on, 17; E. W. Emerson quoted on, 17, 18 and _n._; and Miss Emerson, 18 _n._; influence of his "full and homely idiom" on the conversation of his sons, 18; his philosophy, discussed by =J.=, 96, 97; his essay on Swedenborg, 117; letter of, to Henry James, 169; dangerously ill, 218; =J.='s last letter to, 218-220; his _Secret of Swedenborg_, 220; his death, 221; =J.='s memories of, 221, 222; his mentality described, 241, 242; compared with Carlyle, 241; mentioned, =2=, 6, 7, 27, 36, 53, 68, 80, 92, 103, 104, 115 and _n._, 118, 135 _n._, 153, 157, 158 and _n._, 175, 217, 260, 289, 290, 316, =2=, 39, 278. _See Contents._ _Literary Remains_ of, edited by =J.=, =1=, 4 and _n._, 5 _n._, 10, 13, 236, 239, 240, 241. James, Mrs. Henry, Senior (Mary Walsh), (=J.='s mother), her character, =1=, 9; her death, 218; mentioned, 8, 69, 80, 103, 117, 156, 175, 183, 219, 220. _See Contents._ James, Henry, Jr. (=J.='s brother), impressions of an elder generation reflected in _The Wings of the Dove_, =1=, 7; and his mother, 9; his birth, 9; quoted, on his father, 14; influence of his father's "idiom" on his speech, 18; at the Collège de Boulogne, 20; early secret passion for authorship, 21; his "meteorological blunder," 21; quoted, on =J.=, as "he sits drawing," 22, 23; letter of his father to, 169; his feeling for Europe, 209; its reaction on him and on =J.=, contrasted, 209, 210; described by =J.=, 288; his "third manner" of writing criticized by =J.=, =2=, 240, 277-279; his paper on Boston, 252; mentioned, =1=, 17, 25, 33, 36, 40, 41, 45, 51, 53, 68, 70, 76, 80, 90, 94, 95, 99, 100, 115, 117, 118, 136, 138, 141, 148 _n._, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 218, 219, 240, 258, 260, 262, 269, 283, 284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 319, =2=, 10, 35, 61, 62, 84, 105, 106, 110, 161, 167, 168, 169, 170, 192, 193, 215, 224, 250, 280, 315, 333, 335, 338, 341, 350. _See Contents._ Works of: _The American_, =1=, 185; _The American Scene_, =2=, 264, 277, 299; _The Bostonians_, =1=, 250, 25=1=, 25=2=, 253; _The Golden Bowl_, =2=, 240; Notes _of a Son and Brother_, =1=, 10, 11 _n._, 24, 32, 36, 135 _n._; _Partial Portraits_, 280; _The Portrait of a Lady_, 36; _Princess Cassamassima_, 251; _The Reverberator_, 280; _Roderick Hudson_, 184; _W. W. Story, Life of_, 27 _n._; _The Tragic Muse_, 299; _A Small Boy and Others_, 4 _n._, 8 _n._, 9, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23; _The Wings of the Dove_, 7, 36, =2=, 240. James, Henry, 3d (=J.='s son), =1=, 275, 278, 279, 282, 329, 330, 336, 343, =2=, 30, 31, 84, 129, 143, 145, 147, 159, 324. _See Contents._ James, Hermann (J.'s son), birth of, =1=, 234, 235; death of, 247. James, Margaret M. (=J.='s daughter), birth of, =1=, 267; mentioned, 275, 276, 279, 281, 322, 332, 336, =2=, 43, 54, 98, 102, 110, 130, 191. _See Contents._ James, Robertson (=J.='s brother), in Union army, =1=, 43, 44; mentioned, 17, 33, 41, 43, 52, 60, 69, 70, 81, 136. James, William, =J.='s grandfather, his career, from penury to great wealth, =1=, 2, 3; a leading citizen of Albany, 3; personal appearance, 3; anecdotes of, 3, 4; H. James, Senior, quoted on, 4; his stiff Presbyterianism and its results, 4; his will disallowed by court, 4, 6; marries Catherine Barber, 4. James, William, (=J.='s uncle), =1=, 6. JAMES, WILLIAM. His ancestors in America, =1=, 1; recurrence of his father's habit of thought in, 5 _n._; and his mother, 9; resemblance of, to his father, 10; quoted, on his father, 13; influence of his father's "idiom," 18 and _n._; frequent changes of schools and tutors, 19; in Europe, 1855 to 1858, 19; at the Collège de Boulogne, and the "Academy" of Geneva, 20; quoted, on his education, 20; interest in exact knowledge, 20; begins study of anatomy at Geneva, 21; his cosmopolitanism of consciousness, 22; widely read in three languages, 22; effect of his early training, 22; takes up painting, 22-24; portrait of Katharine Temple, 24; physique, personal appearance and dress, 24, 25; temperament and conversation, 26; "smiting" quality of his best talk, 27; keen about new things, 28; disadvantage of being too encouraging to "little geniuses," 28, 29; freer criticism of those who had arrived, 29; influence as a teacher at Harvard, 29, 30; in Lawrence Scientific School, 31 and _n._; physical condition keeps him out of army in Civil War, 47; transfers from Chemistry to Comparative Anatomy, 47; and Jeffries Wyman, 48, 49; begins course at Medical School, 53; philosophy begins to beckon, 53; joins Agassiz's expedition to the Amazon, 54; his nine months with Agassiz not wasted, 55, 56; has small-pox at Rio, 60, 61, 63 and _n._; interne at Mass. General Hospital, 71; again in Medical School, 71-84. Impaired health causes his visit to Germany, 84, 85; in Dresden, Berlin and Teplitz, 85, 86; describes his condition in letter to his father, 95, 96; returns to U. S., 139; takes degree of M.D. (1869), 140; eye-weakness, 140, 141; scope of his reading, 141, 142 and _n._, 143; his note-books, 143, 144; relation between earlier and later writings, 144 and _n._; morbid depression, 145; chapter on the "sick soul" the story of his own case, 145-147; return of resolution and self-confidence, 147, 148; Instructor in Physiology, 165; his real subject, physiological psychology, 165, 166; his deepest inclination always toward philosophy, 166; H. James, Senior's, letter on the change in =J.='s mental tone and outlook, 169, 170; decides to devote himself to biology, 171; Europe again, 171; end of the period of morbid depression, 171; gives course in Psychology and organizes Psychological Laboratory, 179 and _n_,; contributions to periodicals, 180; on teaching of philosophy in American colleges, 189 _ff._ Marries Alice H. Gibbens, 192; effect of his new domesticity, 193; importance of his wife's companionship and understanding, 193; contracts to write a volume on Psychology, 194; vacations in Keene Valley, 195; his mode of life there, 195; a bit of self-analysis, 199, 200; first work on _Psychology_, 203, 223; declines invitation to teach at Johns Hopkins, 203; in Europe, 1880-83, 208 _ff._; and Henry James, 209, 210; "reaction" on Europe, 209, 210; death of his mother, 218, and of his father, 221; his memories of them, 221, 222; corresponding member of English Society for Psychical Research, 227; an organizer and officer of the American Society, 227; investigates psychic phenomena, 227 _ff._; conducts American Census of Hallucinations, 228, 229; edits his father's _Literary Remains_, 236, 239 _ff._; his life at Chocorua, 271, 272, 273. Abroad in 1889, 286 _ff._; at International Congress of Physiological Psychology, 288, 289, 290; his new house in Cambridge, 290, 291; his inclination toward the under-dog, 292, 293, =2=, 178; completion of the _Psychology_, =1=, 293 _ff._; effect of its publication on his reputation, 300; prepares an abridgment (_Briefer Course_), 300, 301; turns his attention more fully toward philosophy, 301; raises money for Harvard Laboratory, 301, and recommends Münsterberg as its head, 301; his sabbatical year abroad, 302, 320 _ff._; beginning of his friendship with Flournoy, 320; receives honorary degree at Padua, 333. How his mind was moving during the nineties, =2=, 2 _ff._; his opinion of psychology, 2; new courses at Harvard, 3, 4; outside lecturing, 4; would devote his thought and work to metaphysical and religious questions, 5; frustrations, 5, 6; personal appearance, 6, 7; his daily round, 7-9; the Club, 9, 10; nervous break-down, 10; D. S. Miller quoted on, 11-17; attitude toward spelling reform, 18, 19; and Cleveland's Venezuela Message, 26 _ff._; experiments with mescal, 35, 37; Chautauqua lectures, 40 _ff._; work on college committees, 45 _n._, at Faculty meetings, 45 _n._, lectures at Lowell Institute, 54 and _n._, 55; invited to deliver Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 55; Blood's strictures on his English, 59; on a proposed Medical License bill, 66 _ff._; on the Spanish War, 73, 74; corresponding member of Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 75; a memorable night in the Adirondacks, 75-77. Effect on his health of misadventures in the Adirondack, 78, 79, 90, 91; two years of exile and illness, 92 _ff._; an individualist and a liberal, 93; opposed to Philippine policy of McKinley administration, 93, 94; his teaching limited to a half-course a year, 171; lectures and contributions to philosophic journals, 171; strain on his strength, 171; the spirit in which he did his work, 172, 173; receives LL.D. from Harvard, 173 and _n._; replies to Prof. Pratt's _Questionnaire_, 212-215; at Philosophical Congress at Rome, 219, 220, 225 _ff._; lectures at Stanford University, 220, 235, 240, 244 and _n._; and the San Francisco earthquake, 220, 246 _ff._; _Pragmatism_, 220; resigns his professorship, 220, 266 and _n._; the last meeting of his class, 220, 221, 262. Declining health, 283, 333; lectures on Hibbert Foundation at Oxford, 283, 284; uncompleted projects, 284; his attitude toward war, 284, 285, and universal arbitration, 285; tolerance fundamental in his scheme of belief, 286; his report on "Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control," 286, 287; last months in Europe, 333 _ff._; farewell to Harvard Faculty, 334; returns to Chocorua, 350; the end, 350. Letters containing moral counsel, or touching upon problems of _Belief_, =2=, 57, 65, 76, 77, 149, 150, 196, 197, 210, 211, 212-215, 269, 326, 344-346; _Conduct_, =1=, 77-79, 100, 128 _ff._, 148, 199, 200, =2=, 131, 132; _Life and Death_, =1=, 218-220, 309-311, =2=, 130, 154. WORKS OF:-- "Address of the President before the Society for Psychical Research," =2=, 30 and _n._ "Bain and Renouvier," 1, 186. _Briefer Course_ (abridgment of the _Principles of Psychology_), =1=, 300, 301, 304, 314. "Brute and Human Intellect," =1=, 180. "Certain Blindness in Human Beings, A," =2=, 5. _Collected Essays and Reviews_, =1=, 225 _n._, =2=, 20 _n._, 287, 295 _n_. "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher," =2=, 327 and _n._ "Dilemma of Determinism, The," =1=, 237 and _n._, 238. "Does Consciousness Exist?" _See_ "Notion de Conscience, La." "Energies of Men, The," =2=, 252, 284. "Feeling of Effort, The," =1=, 207. "Frederick Myers's Service to Psychology," =2=, 151 and _n._ "German-American Novel, A." =1=, 104 _n._ Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, =J.= invited to deliver, =2=, 55; preparing for, 85, 92, 93; delivered, 144 _ff._; success of, 147, 149, 150, 151; outline of, 150; published as _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 169; mentioned, 75, 96, 97, 105, 108, 111, 115, 127, 134, =2=, 162, 164, 165. And _see_ _Varieties of Religious Experience_, _infra_. "How Two Minds can Know One Thing," =2=, 217 and _n._ _Human Immortality_, =2=, 180 and _n._ "Introspective Psychology, On Some Omissions of," =1=, 230. "Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life, A," =2=, 107 _n._ Lowell Institute Lectures, =2=, 54 and _n._, 55. _Meaning of Truth, The_, =2=, 20 _n._, 327. _Memories and Studies_, =1=, 153, 226 _n._, 229 _n._, =2=, 39 _n._, 59 _n._, 107 _n._, 151 _n._, 193, 247, 285 _n._, 287, 327 _n._ "Moral Equivalent of War, The," =2=, 284. "Notion de Conscience, La," =2=, 226 and _n._, 267 and _n._ "Perception of Space, The," =1=, 266 _n._ "Perception of Time, The," =1=, 266. "Philosophic Reveries," =2=, 339. "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," =2=, 5. _Philosophy, Some Problems of_, =1=, 144 _n._, 186. _Pluralistic Mystic, A._ (lectures on Hibbert Foundation), =2=, 39 _n._, 300, 311, 313, 322, 324, 325, 326, 339. _Pragmatism_, =2=, 17, 276, 279, 292, 294, 295, 300; translated by W. Jerusalem, 297. "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," =2=, 271 and _n._ "Proposed Shortening of the College Course," =2=, 45 _n._ _Psychology, Principles of_, =1=, 194, 203, 223, 224, 249, 268, 269, 283, 293 _ff._, 296, 297, 300, 301, 304 and _n._, 305, 307, 320, =2=, 12, 13. "Quelques Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective," =1=, 180. _Radical Empiricism, Essays in_, =2=, 267 _n._ "Radical Empiricism, Is it Solipsistic?" =2=, 218. "Radical Empiricism as a Philosophy," =2=, 197 _n._ _Selected Essays and Reviews_, =2=, 271. "Sentiment of Rationality, The," =1=, 203 and _n._ "Shaw Monument, Oration on Unveiling of," =2=, 59, 60. "Spatial Quale, The," =1=, 205 and _n._ "Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," =1=, 180. _Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's Problems_, =2=, 4, 5, 40, 79, 286. "Tigers in India, The," =2=, 20 _n._ _Varieties of Religious Experience._ (Gifford Lectures), =1=, 145-147, 293, =2=, 169, 170, 209, 210, 268. "What Psychical Research has Accomplished," =1=, 229 and _n._, 306. "_Will to Believe, The_," =2=, 44, 48, 85, 87, 88, 207, 208, 209, 282. _Will to Believe, The, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_, =1=, 229 _n._, 237 _n._, 280 _n._, =2=, 4, 5, 34, 58 _n._, 64. "Word More about Truth, A," =2=, 295. _See_ also list of Dates at the beginning of Volume I, and the partial bibliography (Appendix II, _infra_). James, Mrs. William (Alice Gibbens), =1=, 192, 193, 195, 196, 217, 218, 232, 237, 247, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 286, 288, 294, 297, 298, 316, 319, 321, 325, 328, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 346, =2=, 5, 7, 8, 9, 20, 24, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 52, 59, 60, 63, 92, 93, 96, 97, 110, 111, 112, 113, 129, 134, 145, 147, 158, 159, 161, 165, 175, 176, 182, 187, 188, 193, 215, 223, 233, 247, 250, 256, 258, 259, 275, 312, 313, 333, 334, 338, 350. _See Contents._ James, William (=J.='s son), birth of, =1=, 234; mentioned, 237, 260, 275, 276, 277, 282, 329, 330, 336, 346, =2=, 92, 98, 129, 159, 174, 175, 185, 186, 187, 250, 258, 259, 274, 275, 276. _See Contents._ Jameson Raid, =2=, 27. Janet, Pierre, =2=, 216, 217, 226, 254. Janet, Mme. Pierre, =2=, 216. Jap, a dog, =1=, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279. Jefferies, Richard, _The Life of the Fields_, =2=, 258, 259. Jeffries, B. Joy, =1=, 163. Jerome, W. T., =2=, 264. Jerusalem, W. _See Contents._ Jevons, F. B., =2=, 306. "Jimmy," students' name for the _Briefer Course_, =1=, 301. Johns Hopkins University, =J.= declines invitation to teach at, =1=, 203. Johnson, Alice, =2=, 311. _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, =1=, 266, =2=, 339. Jung-Stilling, Johann K., _Autobiography_, =1=, 155. Kallen, Horace M., =2=, 271. Kant, Immanuel, _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, =1=, 138, =2=, 179; =J.= lectures on, 45, 47, 51, 54; mentioned, =1=, 117, 141, 191, 202, 205, =2=, 3. Kaulbach, W. von, =1=, 90. Keane, Bishop, =1=, 294. Keene Valley, Adirondacks, =J.='s summer holidays in, =1=, 194, 195, 196; an eventful 24 hours, and its effect, =2=, 75-79, 95; his further misadventure, 90, 91; mentioned, =1=, 232, =2=, 51, 259, 261, 296, 297. Kipling, Rudyard, _The Light that Failed_, =1=, 307; mentioned, =2=, 21, 22, 231. Kitchin, George W., =2=, 306. Knox, H. V., =2=, 313, 314. Kruger, Paul, =2=, 27. Kolliker, R. A. von, =1=, 123. Kosmos, the startling discoveries concerning, =1=, 101. Kühnemann, Eugen, =2=, 263. La Farge, Bancel, =2=, 275. La Farge, John, =1=, 24, 91, =2=, 173. Lamar, Lucuis Q. C., =1=, 251. Lamb, Charles, =2=, 239. Lamb House, Rye, Henry James's English home, =2=, 107, 111. Lawrence Scientific School, Chemical laboratory in, =1=, 31; C. W. Eliot quoted on =J.='s course in, 31, 32 and _n._ Leibnitz, Baron G. W. von, =2=, 13. Lemaître, Jules, =2=, 63. _Leonardo_, =2=, 227, 228, 245. Leopardi, Giacomo, "To Sylvia," =1=, 246 and _n._ Lesley, Susan I., _Recollections of my Mother_, =2=, 135 and _n._ Lessing, Gotthold E., _Emilia Galotti_, =1=, 91; Fischer's Essay on _Nathan der Weise_, 94. Leuba, James H., =2=, 210, 211, 218. _See Contents._ Lincoln, Abraham, effect of his death, =1=, 66, 67; characterized by =J.=, 67. Linville, N. C., =1=, 316, 317. Lister, Sir Joseph, =1=, 72. Lloyd, Henry D., =2=, 166. Locke, John, =1=, 191, =2=, 165, 257. Lodge, Henry Cabot, =2=, 30. Lodge, Sir Oliver, =1=, 229 _n._ Loeser, Charles A., =1=, 337, 339. Lombroso, Cesar, =2=, 15. London, =1=, 175, =2=, 307. London, _Times_, =2=, 43, 65, 118. Long, George, =1=, 78. Loring, Katharine P., =1=, 259, 262, 311, 316. Lotze, Rudolf H., =1=, 206, 208. Loubet, Émile, President of France, =2=, 89, 98. Lowell, A. Lawrence, =2=, 326. Lowell, James Russell, death of, =1=, 314, 315 _n._; =J.='s memory of, 315; mentioned, 195. Lucerne, =2=, 133. Ludwig, Karl F. W., =1=, 72, 160, 215. Lutoslawski, W., =2=, 103, 171. _See Contents._ McDougall, William, =2=, 313, 314, 315. McKinley, William, and the Spanish War, =2=, 74; Philippine Policy of his administration disapproved by =J.=, 93, 94, 289; and Roosevelt, =J.='s description of, 94; mentioned, 50, 101, 102, 109. MacMonnies, F. W., Bacchante, =2=, 62 and _n._, 63. Macaulay, Thomas B., Lord, =1=, 225. Mach, Ernst, =1=, 211, 212. Maine, U. S. S., explosion of, =2=, 73. Manchester College. _See_ Hibbert Foundation. Marcus Aurelius, =1=, 78, 79. Marshall, Henry Rutgers, _Instinct and Reason_, =1=, 87. _See Contents_. Martin, L. J., =2=, 246, 249. Martineau, James, =1=, 283. Mascagni, Pietro, _I Rantzau_, =1=, 334, 335. Massachusetts General Hospital, =1=, 71, 72. Materialism, =1=, 82, 83. Maudsley, Henry, =1=, 143. Maupassant, Guy de, =1=, 282. Medical License bill (proposed), in Mass., =2=, 66 _ff._ Mediums, =1=, 228, =2=, 287, 311. And _see_ Paladino, Eusapia, and Piper, Mrs. Mental Hygiene, Connecticut Society for, =2=, 273; National Committee for, 273. Merriman, Daniel. _See Contents._ Merriman, Mrs. Daniel, =2=, 118. Merriman, R. B., =2=, 63, 66, 132, 175. Mescal, =J.='s experiment with, =2=, 35, 37. Metaphysical problems, =J.='s mind haunted by, =2=, 2. Metaphysics, outline of course offered by =J.= in, =2=, 3, 4; =J.='s proposed system of, 179, 180. Meysenbug, Malwida von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_, =2=, 135 and _n._ Mezes, Sidney E., =2=, 14. Mill, John Stuart, =1=, 164, =2=, 267. Miller, Dickinson S., quoted, on =J.= as a teacher and lecturer, =2=, 11-17; "Truth and Error," 18; quoted, on =J.='s talks with Columbia Faculty Club, 265 _n._; his "study" of =J.=, 331, 332; mentioned, 87, 88, 137, 163, 232 _n._, 282. _See Contents._ _Mind_, =1=, 254, 255. Mind-curers. _See_ Faith-curers. Miracles, =2=, 57, 58. Mitchell, S. Weir, =2=, 37. Monism, =1=, 238, 244, 245. Montgomery, Edmund, =1=, 254, 255. Morgan, C. Lloyd, =2=, 216. Moritz, C. P., =1=, 141. Morley, John, _Voltaire_, =1=, 144 _n._ Morse, Frances R., =1=, 197, =2=, 106, 113, 232. _See Contents._ Morse, Mary. _See_ Elliot, Mrs. John W. Morse, John T., =2=, 10. Motterone, Monte, =1=, 324. Müller, G. E., =1=, 312, 313. Munich Congress, =2=, 46, 50. Munk, H., =1=, 213, 114. Münsterberg, Hugo, recommended by =J.= as head of Harvard Psychological Laboratory, =1=, 301, 302; "the Rudyard Kipling of philosophy," 318; "an immense success," 332; criticizes =J.=, =2=, 267, 268; mentioned, =1=, 312, =2=, 2, 18, 121, 229, 270, 293, 320. _See Contents._ Murray, Gilbert, =2=, 271. Musset, Alfred de, =2=, 63. Myers, F. W. H., _Human Personality_, =1=, 229 _n._, =2=, 151, 185 and _n._; death of, 141; =J.='s tribute to, 141, 151, 157; mentioned, =1=, 287, 290, =2=, 57, 114, 118, 156, 157, 161. _See Contents._ Myers, Mrs. F. W. H., =1=, 290, 345, =2=, 151, 157. Naples, =2=, 222. _Nation, The_, review of _Literary Remains of Henry James_ in, =1=, 240, 241; =J.='s comments on, 284; and Cleveland's Venezuela Message, =2=, 28; mentioned, =1=, 70, 92, 104 and _n._, 117, 118, 161, 186, 188, 189, =2=, 42, 182, 332. Nauheim (Bad), =2=, 92, 93, 95, 104, 107, 134, 135, 157, 158, 160, 333, 338. Neilson, Adelaide, =1=, 168. Nevins, John C., _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, =2=, 56 and _n._ New Forest, The, =2=, 160, 161. _New Jerusalem Messenger_, H. James, Senior's, letter to editor of, =1=, 14-16. _New World, The_, =1=, 334, =2=, 44. New York City, =2=, 264, 265. Newcomb, Simon, =1=, 250. Newport, R. I., =2=, 202, 203. Newton, Sir Isaac, =2=, 1 _n._ Nichols, Herbert, =1=, 335, =2=, 14. Nietzsche, Friedrich W., =2=, 233. Nivedita, Sister, =2=, 144. Nonentity, Idea of, =2=, 293. Nordau, Max S., _Entartung_, =2=, 19; mentioned, 17. Norton, Charles Eliot, Ruskin's letters to, =2=, 206; mentioned, =1=, 181, 291, 331, 338, 347, =2=, 191, 199. _See Contents._ Norton, Grace, =1=, 284, =2=, 191. _See Contents._ Norton, Mrs. Charles E. (Susan Sedgwick), =1=, 181. Norton Woods, the, =2=, 201. Olney, Richard, and the Venezuela Message, =2=, 27, 29. Optimism, =1=, 83, 238. Oregon, forest fires in, =2=, 80. Ostensacken, Baron, =1=, 337, 339. Ostwald, W., =2=, 229. Oxford, =2=, 307. Padua, Galileo anniversary at, =1=, 333 and _n._; University of, confers degree on =J.=, 333. Pædagogy, =2=, 47. Paladino, Eusapia, =2=, 186 and _n._, 311, 320, 327. Paley, William, =1=, 283. Pallanza, Italy, =1=, 329. Palmer, George H., a Hegelian, =1=, 205, 208; investigates psychic phenomena with =J.=, 227; mentioned, 202, 292, 335, =2=, 2, 18. _See Contents._ Palmer, Mrs. Alice Freeman, =2=, 124. Papini, Giovanni, _Crepuscolo dei Filosofi_, =2=, 245, 246; mentioned, 172, 227, 228, 229, 257, 267. Paris, =1=, 174, 175, 217. Paris Commune (1871), =1=, 161. Parkman, Francis, =2=, 10. Parkman, Mrs. Henry, =2=, 205. Parthenon, the, =2=, 224, 225. Party spirit, the only permanent force of corruption in the U. S., =2=, 100. Pasteur, Louis, =1=, 72, 225. Paty du Clam, Colonel du, =2=, 98. Paulsen, Friederich, _Einleitung_, =1=, 346, =2=, 244. Peabody, Elizabeth, =1=, 112. Peabody, Frances G., =2=, 229. Peace Congress, =2=, 277. Peillaube, M., =2=, 228, 229. Peirce, Benjamin, =1=, 32. Peirce, Charles S., =1=, 33, 34, 80, 149, 169, =2=, 191, 233, 294, 328. Peirce, James M., =2=, 258. Perry, Ralph Barton, his _List of Published Writings_ of =J.=, =1=, 144, 223, 224; mentioned, =2=, 121, 163, 234, 295. Perry, Thomas S., with =J.= in Berlin, =1=, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 117, 124; mentioned, 40 _n._, 60, 91, 94, 102, 106, 134, 151, 157, 169, =2=, 10. _See Contents._ Pertz, Mrs. Emma (Wilkinson), =1=, 135 and _n._ Pessimism, =1=, 238. Peterson, Ellis, =1=, 166. Pflüger, Dr., =1=, 156. Phelps, Edward J., =2=, 27 _n._ Philippine question, the, =2=, 167, 168. Philippines, policy of McKinley administration concerning, =2=, 93, 94; duty of U. S. with regard to, 289. Philosophical Club, University of California, =J.='s lectures to, =2=, 79. _Philosophical Review_, =2=, 228. Philosophical Society, =J.= refuses to join, =2=, 164. Philosophy, =J.= begins to feel the pull of, =1=, 53, 54; difficulties attending teaching of, in American colleges, 188, 189, 190. Physiological Psychology, =1=, 165, 166, 179. Physiological Psychology, International Congress of, =1=, 288, 289, 290. Physiology, =J.= attends lectures on, in Berlin, =1=, 118, 120, 121; =J.='s first teaching subject, 165. Picquart, M. G. (Dreyfus case), =2=, 67, 98. Piddington, J. G., =2=, 311. Pierce, George W., =2=, 14. Pillon, François, =1=, 208, 229, 233, 343, =2=, 45, 79. _See Contents._ Pillon, Mme. François, =2=, 73, 204, 338, 343. Pinkham, Lydia E., "the Venus of Medicine," =1=, 261 and _n._ Piper, Mrs. William, =J.= quoted on, =1=, 227, 228; mentioned, =2=, 242, 311, 319, 320. And _see_ Hodgson, R. Plato, =1=, 283. Pluralism, =1=, 186, =2=, 155. Pluralistic idealism, =2=, 22. Pollock, Sir Frederick, =1=, 222, =2=, 199. Pomfret, Conn., =1=, 153, 154. _Popular Science Monthly_, =1=, 190. Porter, Noah, =1=, 231, 232. Porter, Samuel, =1=, 214. Porto Rico, =2=, 74. Potter, Horatio, =1=, 59. Powderly, Terence V., =1=, 284. Pragmatism, and radical empiricism, distinction between, =2=, 267; disadvantages of the word as a title, 271, 295, 298. Prague, =1=, 211, 212, 213. Pratt, James B., =J.='s replies to his questionnaire on religious belief, =2=, 212-215. Pratt, M., =2=, 204. Prince, William H., =1=, 37, 39, 42, 44. Prince, Mrs. William H. (Katharine James), =1=, 42. _See Contents._ Princeton Theological Seminary, H. James, Senior, at, =1=, 8. Pringle-Pattison, A. S., =2=, 325, 326. And _see_ Seth, Andrew. Profession, choice of, =1=, 75, 79, 123. Prussia, political conditions in (1867), =1=, 95; and France, 95. Prussians, =1=, 122. Psychic phenomena, investigated by =J.= and Palmer, =1=, 225 _ff._; mentioned, 248, 250, 305, 306, =2=, 56, 287, 320. Psychical Research, American Society for, =J.= active in organizing, =1=, 227; amalgamated with English Society, 227; =J.= on its function, 249, 250, =2=, 242, 286, 306. Psychical Research, English Society for, founded, =1=, 227; =J.= a corresponding member, vice-president, and president of, 227, 229 _n._, 248. Psychologists, American Association of, =2=, 20. Psychology, =J.= begins to read on, =1=, 118, 119; =J.= gives course in, 179; =J.= helps to make it a modern science, 224, 225; "a nasty little subject," =2=, 2. Psychology, Experimental, in U. S., History of, =1=, 179 _n._ Psychology, Physiological. _See_ Physiological Psychology. Putnam, Charles P., =1=, 71, 195, 196, 327, =2=, 296. Putnam, Frederick W., =1=, 31. Putnam, George, =2=, 224, 225. Putnam, James J., letter to =J.= on Medical License bill, =2=, 72 _n._; mentioned, =1=, 71, 168, 195, 196, =2=, 112, 128, 147, 249. _See Contents._ Putnam, Marian (Mrs. James J.), =2=, 249. Quincy, Henry P., =1=, 77, 122. Radcliffe College, =2=, 4, 24, 180 _n._, 181. Radcliffe College, =J.='s class at. _See Contents._ Radical Empiricism and pragmatism, distinction between, =2=, 267; mentioned, 203, 204. Rafael Sanzio, the Sistine Madonna, =1=, 90. Raffaello, Florentine cook, =1=, 339, 341. Rankin, Henry W., =2=, 55. _See Contents._ Reed, Thomas B., =2=, 50. Reid, Carveth, =1=, 205, 222. Religion, =J.='s views on, =2=, 64, 65, 127, 149, 150, 211 _ff._, 269. Renan, Ernest, death of, =1=, 326; mentioned, 110, =2=, 123, 338. Renouvier, Charles, the _Année 1867 Philosophique_, =1=, 138, 186; influence on =J.= of his writings on free will, 147, 169; =J.='s first acquaintance with his work, 186; =J.='s correspondence with, 186; translates some of =J.='s papers, 186; his articles on Fouillée, 231; _Principes de la Nature_, 334; his _Philosophy of History_, =2=, 44, 47; his death, 204; _Monadologie_ and _Personalisme_, 204; mentioned, =1=, 138, 205. _See Contents._ Republican Party, the, in 1899, =2=, 94. Reverdin, M., =2=, 267. Rhea, Jannet, =1=, 4 _n._ Rhea, Matthew, =1=, 4 _n._ Rhodes, James F., _History of the U. S._, =2=, 27 _n._; mentioned, 10. Richet, Charles, =1=, 229 _n._, =2=, 114, 225. Richter, Jean Paul, =1=, 141. Rindge, Frederick H., =1=, 330, =2=, 39. Rio de Janeiro, =1=, 58 _ff._ Risks, choice of, =2=, 49, 50. Ritter, Charles, =1=, 23, =2=, 25, 55. Robertson, Alexander, =1=, 8, 9. Robertson, G. Croom, editor of _Mind_, =1=, 222, 254. _See Contents._ Robeson, Andrew R., =1=, 33. Romanism and Anglicanism, =2=, 305. Romanticism, =1=, 256. Rome, Philosophical Congress at, =2=, 225 _ff._, 228; mentioned, =1=, 178, 180, =2=, 138, 139, 269. Roosevelt, Theodore, as possible President of Harvard, =2=, 232 and _n._; mentioned, 94, 266. Ropes, John C., death of, =2=, 108, 109; mentioned, =1=, 35, =2=, 10, 156. Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio, =1=, 295. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, =1=, 142. Royce, Josiah, early life, =1=, 200, 201; quoted, on his first acquaintance with =J.=, 200, 201; brought to Harvard through =J.='s influence, 201; his _Religious Aspect of Philosophy_, 239, 242, 265; "a perfect little Socrates," 249; made professor, 332; and =J.=, as teachers, compared by Miller, =2=, 16; "the Rubens of philosophy," 86; _The World and the Individual_, 113 and _n._, 114, 116, 121 and _n._; his system, 114; a sketcher in philosophy, 114, 116; mentioned, =1=, 238, 239, 255, 262, 280, 291, 318, 347, =2=, 18, 122, 143, 216, 234, 321, 322. _See Contents._ Ruskin, John, his letters to C. E. Norton, =2=, 206, 207; characterized by =J.=, 206; _Modern Painters_, 206; mentioned, =1=, 220, =2=, 306. Rye (England), =2=, 104. And _see_ Lamb House. Sabatier, Paul, =2=, 142. St. Gaudens, Augustus, his monument to R. G. Shaw unveiled, =2=, 59-61. St. Louis, hurricane at, =2=, 35, 36. St. Louis Exposition (1904), =2=, 216. Sainte-Beuve, C. A., =1=, 142. Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Marquis of, =2=, 27. Salter, C. C., =1=, 51. Salter, W. M., =1=, 248, 346, =2=, 97. _See Contents._ Salter, Mrs. W. M. (Mary Gibbens), =1=, 248. San Francisco, earthquake at, =2=, 246 _ff._, 251, 256; mentioned, 80, 81. Sanctis, Professor di, =2=, 225. Sand, George, and A. de Musset, =2=, 63; mentioned, =1=, 106, 182, 183. Santayana, George, _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, =2=, 122-124; _Life of Reason_, 234, 235; mentioned, =1=, 335, =2=, 14, 121, 225. _See Contents._ Sardou, Victorien, _Agnes_, =1=, 168. Sargent, Epes, _Planchette_, reviewed by =J.=, =1=, 225 _n._ Sargent, John S., =1=, 303. _Saturday Club, Early Years of the_. _See_ Emerson, Edward W. Saxons, the, =1=, 86. Scenery, part played by, in =J.='s spiritual experience, =2=, 174, 175. Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von, =1=, 14. Schiller, F. C. S., his article on =J.= in _Mind_, =2=, 65, 66; _Studies in Humanism_, 270; mentioned, 172, 186 _n._, 208, 230, 257, 267, 296, 300, 311, 313, 314, 337. _See Contents._ Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von, =1=, 91, 141, 202. Schinz, Herr, =2=, 337. Schlegel, August W. von, =1=, 141. Schlegel, Karl W. F. von, =1=, 141. Schmidt, Heinrich J., _History of German Literature_, =1=, 141. Schopenhauer, Arthur, =1=, 191, =2=, 293. Schott, Dr. (Nauheim), =2=, 124, 128, 134, 157. Schurman, Jacob G., =1=, 334, =2=, 166. Scotland, =J.= strongly attracted by, =1=, 286. Scott, Sir Walter, his _Journal_, =1=, 309. Scripture, Edward W., =1=, 334. Scudder, Samuel H., =1=, 31. Sea, =J.='s views of traveling by, =1=, 58. Seals, trained, =1=, 278. Sécretan, Charles, =1=, 324. Sedgwick, Arthur G., =1=, 320 and _n._, =2=, 10. Sedgwick, Lucy (Mrs. Arthur G.), =1=, 320 and _n._ Sedgwick, Sara, =1=, 76 and _n._ And _see_ Darwin, Mrs. W. E. Sedgwick, Theodora, =1=, 181, 291, 315, 317, 328, 331, =2=, 151, 152, 191, 200, 207, 308. _See Contents._ Selberg, "a swell young Jew," =1=, 112, 114, 115. Semler, Dr., =1=, 87. Seth, Andrew, =2=, 96, 116, 144. And _see_ Pringle-Pattison, A. S. Seth, James, =2=, 144. Shakespeare: H. Grimm on _Hamlet_, =1=, 111; _As You Like It_, 144 _n._, 190; at Stratford, =2=, 166; mentioned, 330, 335, 336. Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, on J. Wyman, =1=, 48; _The Individual_, =2=, 153 and _n._, 154; _Autobiography_, 325; mentioned, =1=, 31, =2=, 258, 288. _See Contents._ Shaw, G. Bernard, _Cæsar and Cleopatra_, =2=, 263; mentioned, 330. Shaw, Robert G., unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to, =2=, 59-61; mentioned, =1=, 43. Sherman, William T., =1=, 56, 57. Sidgwick, Henry, "Lecture against Lecturing," =2=, 12; death of, 141; mentioned, =1=, 229 _n._, 287, 290, 345, =2=, 50, 156. Slattery, Charles L. _See Contents._ Smith, Adam, =1=, 283. Smith, Norman K. _See Contents._ Smith, Paulina C., =2=, 106. Smith, Pearsall, =1=, 287. Snow, William F., quoted, on =J.= and the San Francisco earthquake, =2=, 247 _n._ Snow, Mrs. W. F., =2=, 246. Society for Psychical Research. _See_ Psychical Research, Society for. Solomons, Leon M., death of, =2=, 119; his character and work, 119, 120. Sorbonne, the, =J.= declines appointment as exchange professor at, =2=, 236 and _n._ Sorrento, to Amalfi, =2=, 221, 222. Spain, misrule of, in Cuba, =2=, 73. Spanish War, the, =2=, 73, 74. Spannenberg, Frau, =1=, 85. _Spectator, The_, =2=, 126. Spelling reform, =J.='s attitude toward, =2=, 18, 19. Spencer, Herbert, _Psychology_, =1=, 188; _Data of Ethics_, 264; mentioned, 143, 164, 191, 254. Spinoza, Baruch, =1=, 283, =2=, 13. Spirit-theory, the. _See_ Psychic phenomena. Spiritualism. _See_ Psychic phenomena. Spiritualists, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68. Springfield _Republican_, =2=, 125. Stanford, Leland, =2=, 242, 244. Stanford, Mrs. Leland, =1=, 242, 244. Stanford, Leland, Jr.,=1=, 243. Stanford University, =J.='s lectures at, =2=, 235, 240, 244 and _n._; a miracle, 241; its history, 242, 243; what it might be made, 243, 244. Stanley, Sir Henry M., =1=, 303. Stanley, Lady, =1=, 303. Starbuck, E. D., _Psychology of Religion_, =2=, 217. _See Contents._ Stead, W. T., =2=, 276, 277. Steffens, Heinrich, =1=, 141. Stephen. Sir James Fitz-James, "Essay on Spirit-Rapping," =1=, 34 _n._ Stephen, Sir Leslie, _Utilitarians_, =2=, 152; his letters, 176. Steuben, Baron von, =1=, 5. Storey, Moorfield, =1=, 109, =2=, 10. _See Contents._ Stout, G. F., =2=, 47, 65. Strasburg, =1=, 86, 87. Stratford-on-Avon, and the Baconian theory, =2=, 166. Strong, Charles A., =2=, 198, 225, 229, 230, 282, 295, 301, 309, 310, 315, 337. _See Contents._ Stumpf, Carl, _Tonpsychologie_, =1=, 266, 267; mentioned, 211, 212, 213, 216, 289. _See Contents._ Sturgis, James, =1=, 184. Style in philosophic writing, =2=, 217, 228, 229, 237, 244, 245, 257, 272, 281, 300. Subjectivism, tendency to, =1=, 249. Subliminal, Problem of the, =2=, 141, 149, 150, 212. Success, worship of, =2=, 260. Sully, James, =2=, 1 _n._, 225, 226, 218. _See Contents._ "Supernatural" matters. _See_ Psychic phenomena. Suttner, Baroness von, _Waffennieder_, =2=, 340. Swedenborg, Emmanuel, influence of his works on H. James, Senior, =1=, 12, 13, 14; _Society of the Redeemed Form of Man_, quoted, 12 and _n._; H. James, Senior's, essay on, 117; mentioned, =2=, 40. Switzerland, =1=, 322, 323, 327, 328, 336. Sylvain, Mlle., =2=, 224. Sylvain, M., =2=, 224. Tappan, Mary, =2=, 200. _See Contents._ Tappan, Mrs., =1=, 118. Taylor, A. E., =2=, 208, 216, 281, 282. Temple, Ellen, =1=, 38, 39, 51, =2=, 61, 81. And _see_ Emmet, Mrs. Temple. Temple, Henrietta, =1=, 39. Temple, Katharine, =J.='s portrait of, =1=, 24; mentioned, 36, 51, 74, 75. _See Contents._ Temple, "Minny," the original of two of Henry James's heroines, =1=, 36; =J.= quoted on, 36, 37; her "madness," 38; mentioned, 43, 51, 74, 75, 98. Temple, Mrs. Robert (=J.='s aunt), =1=, 36. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, =2=, 276. Teplitz, =1=, 133, 134, 137. Thames, the, =1=, 287. Thatness. _See_ Whatness. Thaw, Henry, trial of, =2=, 264. Thayer, Abbott, =2=, 276. Thayer, Gerald, =2=, 275, 276. Thayer, Joseph Henry, =1=, 323. Thayer, Miriam, =1=, 323. Thayer Expedition. _See_ Brazil, Agassiz's expedition to. Thies, Louis, =1=, 107, 112, 157. Thies, Miss, =1=, 116. Thompson, Daniel G., =1=, 295. Tieck, Ludwig, =1=, 141. Tolstoy, Leo, _War and Peace_, =2=, 37, 40, 48; and P. Bourget, 37, 38; _Anna Karenina_, 41, 48; and H. G. Wells, 316; mentioned, 44, 45, 51, 52, 63. Torquay, =2=, 167. Townsend, Henry E., =1=, 122. Truth, the, obscured by American philosophers, =2=, 237, 272, 337. Tuck, Henry, =1=, 122, 124. Tuckerman, Emily, =2=, 168. Turgenieff, Ivan, =1=, 177, 182, 185. Twain, Mark, =1=, 333, 341, 342, =2=, 264. Tweedie, Mrs. Edmund, =1=, 36. Tweedies, the, =1=, 117, 184. Tychism, =2=, 204, 292. Tychistic and pluralistic philosophy of pure experience, =2=, 187. Union College, H. James, Senior, graduates at, =1=, 8. _Unitarian Review_, Davidson's article in, =1=, 236. Unitarianism (Boston), the "bloodless pallor" of, =1=, 236. United States, =J.='s remarks on, =1=, 216, 217; and the Philippines, =2=, 140, 141; rushing to wallow in the mire of empire, 141; manner of eating boiled eggs in, 188; vocalization of people of, 189; and England, 304, 305. Upham, Miss, =1=, 34, 50. Uphues, =1=, 345, 346. Van Buren, "Elly," =1=, 70, 74, 75. Van Rensselaer, Stephen, =1=, 3. Venezuela Message, Cleveland's, =2=, 26 _ff._ Venus de Milo, =1=, 113. Verne, Jules, _Tour of the World in Eighty Days_, =1=, 173. Veronese, Paul, =1=, 90. Verrall, Mrs. A. W. _See_ Mediums. Vers-chez-les-Blanc, =1=, 320, 345, =2=, 48. Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, =2=, 227. Victoria, Queen, her Jubilee, =1=, 270. Vienna, exhibition of French paintings at, =1=, 210. Villari, Pasquale, =1=, 338, 339, 342. Villari, Mrs., =1=, 338, 339, 342. Vincent, George E., =2=, 41, 42. Virchow, Rudolf, =1=, 72. Vischer, F. T., Essays, =1=, 94; _Aesthetik_, 94. Viti, Signor da, =2=, 227. Vivekananda, =2=, 144. Voltaire, =1=, 144 _n._ Vulpian, A., =1=, 156. Walcott, Henry P., =1=, 347, =2=, 10. Waldstein, Charles, =1=, 274, =2=, 224. _See Contents._ Walsh, Catherine (=J.='s 'Aunt Kate'), =1=, 41, 51, 60, 61, 70, 80, 81, 114, 118, 183, 218, 259, 280, 282, 285. Walsh, Hugh, =1=, 8. Walsh, Rev. Hugh, =1=, 8 _n._ Walsh, James (=J.='s maternal grandfather), =1=, 8. Walsh, Mary, marries H. James, Senior, =1=, 8; her ancestry, 8, 9. And _see_ James, Mrs. William. Walsh, Mrs. Mary (Robertson), =1=, 8. Walston, Sir Charles. _See_ Waldstein, Charles. Wambaugh, Eugene, =2=, 132. Ward, James, =2=, 312, 313, 314, 315. Ward, Samuel, =1=, 73. Ward, Thomas W., on the Brazilian expedition, =1=, 59, 60, 65; mentioned, 33. _See Contents._ Ward, Dorothy, =2=, 166. Ware, William R., =1=, 124, 153. Waring, Daisy, =2=, 202. Waring, George E., quoted, on Henry James, =1=, 184, 185. Warner, Joseph B., =2=, 160, 233. Warren, W. R., =2=, 233. Washington, Booker T., _Up from Slavery_, =2=, 148; mentioned, 60, 61. Washington, Mrs. Booker T., at Ashfield, =2=, 199. Washington, George, =1=, 5, 277. Washington, State of, forest fires in, =2=, 80. Wells, H. G., _Utopia_, =2=, 230, 231; _Anticipations_, 231; _Mankind in the Making_, 231; =J.='s appreciation of, 231; _Kipps_, 241; "Two Studies in Disappointment," 259, 260; _First and Last Things_, 316; the Tolstoy of the English World, 316; mentioned, 246, 257, 318. _See Contents._ Werner, G., =2=, 242. Whatness and thatness, =1=, 244, 245. "White man's burden," cant about the, =2=, 88. Whitman, Henry, death of, =2=, 156; mentioned, =1=, 298, 302. Whitman, Sarah (Mrs. Henry), her character and accomplishments, =1=, 302, =2=, 205, 206; last illness and death, 204, 205, 207; mentioned, =1=, 309 _n._, 348, =2=, 156, 256. _See Contents._ Whitman, Walt, =2=, 123. Whole, Idolatry of the, =1=, 246, 247. Wilkinson, Emma. _See_ Pertz, Mrs. Emma. Wilkinson, J. J. Garth, =1=, 135 _n._ William II of Germany, his message to Kruger, =2=, 27, 28. Wilmarth, Mrs., =2=, 50. Witmer, Lightner, =2=, 320. Wolff, Christian, =1=, 264. Woodberry, George E., _The Heart of Man._ =2=, 89, 90. Woodbridge, F. J. E., _Journal_, =2=, 244. _See Contents._ Worcester, Elwood, _The Living World_, =2=, 318. Wordsworth, W., _The Excursion_, =1=, 168, 169. Wright, Chauncy, and =J.=, =1=, 152 _n._; mentioned, =2=, 233. Wundt, Wilhelm M., as a type of the German professor, =1=, 263; his _System_, 333; mentioned, 119, 215, 216, 224, 264, 295, =2=, 321. Wyman, Jeffries, influence as a teacher, =1=, 47; C. W. Eliot and N. S. Shaler quoted on, 47, 48; =J.= quoted on, 48, 49; mentioned, 35, 37, 50, 71, 72, 150, 155, 160, 163, 170. Yale University, =1=, 231. Yankees, a German lady's idea of, =1=, 89, 90. Yoga practices, =2=, 252 _ff._ Yosemite Valley, =2=, 81. Zennig's restaurant (Berlin), =1=, 112, 113. _Zion's Herald_, Emerson number of, =2=, 197. Zola, Émile, _Germinal_, =1=, 287; mentioned, =2=, 67, 73. MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG. BOSTON * * * * * The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext transcriber: mutally encouraging=>mutually encouraging Malvida von Meysenbug, Stuttgart, 1877=>Malwida von Meysenbug, Stuttgart, 1877 Meysenbug, Malvida von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_=>Meysenbug, Malwida von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_ Rome eems to beat=>Rome seems to beat Qu'on est bien dans çe fauteuil=>Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [1] "It seems to me that psychology is like physics before Galileo's time--not a single elementary law yet caught a glimpse of. A great chance for some future psychologue to make a greater name than Newton's; but who then will read the books of this generation? Not many, I trow. Meanwhile they must be written." To James Sully, July 8, 1890. [2] President Eliot, in a memorandum already referred to (vol. 1, p. 32, note), calls attention to these courses and remarks: "These frequent changes were highly characteristic of James's whole career as a teacher. He changed topics, textbooks and methods frequently, thus utilizing his own wide range of reading and interest and his own progress in philosophy, and experimenting from year to year on the mutual contacts and relations with his students." James continued to be titular Professor of Psychology until 1897, just as he had been nominally Assistant Professor of Physiology for several years during which the original and important part of his teaching was psychological. His title never indicated exactly what he was teaching. [3] At this meeting he delivered a presidential address "On the Knowing of Things Together," a part of which is reprinted in _The Meaning of Truth_, p. 43, under the title, "The Tigers in India." _Vide_, also, _Collected Essays and Reviews_. [4] In a brief letter to the _Harvard Crimson_ (Jan. 9, 1896), James urged the right and duty of individuals to stand up for their opinions publicly during such crises, even though in opposition to the administration. Mr. Rhodes, in his _History of the United States, 1877-1896_, makes the following observation: "Cleveland, in his chapter on the 'Venezuelan Boundary Controversy,' rates the un-Americans who lauded 'the extreme forbearance and kindness of England.' ... The reference ... need trouble no one who allows himself to be guided by two of Cleveland's trusted servants and friends. Thomas F. Bayard, Secretary of State during the first administration, and actual ambassador to Great Britain, wrote in a private letter on May 25, 1895, 'There is no question now open between the United States and Great Britain that needs any but frank, amicable and just treatment.' Edward J. Phelps, his first minister to England, in a public address on March 30, 1896, condemned emphatically the President's Venezuela policy." See Rhodes, _History_, vol. VIII, p. 454; also p. 443 _et seq._ [5] "The Evolution of the Summer Resort." [6] "Address of the President before the Society for Psychical Research." Proc. of the (Eng.) Soc. for Psych. Res. 1896, vol. XII, pp. 2-10; also in _Science_, 1896, N. S., vol. IV, pp. 881-888. [7] From the last paragraph of Cleveland's Venezuela message. [8] In 1910--during his final illness, in fact--James fulfilled this promise. See "A Pluralistic Mystic," included in Memories and Studies; also letter of June 25, 1910, p. 348 _infra_. [9] Cf. William James's unsigned review of Blood's _Anæsthetic Revelation_ in the _Atlantic Monthly_, 1874, vol. XXXIV, p. 627. [10] James always did a reasonable share of college committee work, especially for the committee of his own department. But although he had exercised a determining influence in the selection of every member of the Philosophical Department who contributed to its fame in his time (except Professor Palmer, who was his senior in service), he never consented to be chairman of the Department. He attended the weekly meetings of the whole Faculty for any business in which he was concerned; otherwise irregularly. He spoke seldom in Faculty. Occasionally he served on special committees. He usually formed an opinion of his own quite quickly, but his habitual tolerance in matters of judgment showed itself in good-natured patience with discussion--this despite the fact that he often chafed at the amount of time consumed. "Now although I happen accidentally to have been on all the committees which have had to do with the proposed reform, and have listened to the interminable Faculty debates last winter, I disclaim all powers or right to speak in the _name_ of the majority. Members of our dear Faculty have a way of discovering reasons fitted exclusively for their idiosyncratic use, and though voting with their neighbors, will often do so on incommunicable grounds. This is doubtless the effect of much learning upon originally ingenious minds; and the result is that the abundance of different points and aspects which a simple question ends by presenting, after a long Faculty discussion, beggars both calculation beforehand and enumeration after the fact."--"The Proposed Shortening of the College Course." _Harvard Monthly_, Jan., 1891. [1] "I _loved_ Child more than any man I know." Sept. 12, '96. [11] Eight lectures on "Abnormal Mental States" were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, but were never published. Their several titles were "Dreams and Hypnotism," "Hysteria," "Automatisms," "Multiple Personality," "Demoniacal Possession," "Witchcraft," "Degeneration," "Genius." In a letter to Professor Howison (Apr. 5, 1897) James said, "In these lectures I did not go into psychical research so-called, and although the subjects were decidedly morbid, I tried to shape them towards optimistic and hygienic conclusions, and the audience regarded them as decidedly anti-morbid in their tone." [12] _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, by John C. Nevius. [13] _The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_ had just appeared. [14] The Address has been reprinted in _Memories and Studies_. [15] For a short while MacMonnies's Bacchante stood in the court of the Boston Public Library. [16] These words were not employed in public, but were once applied to a well-known professor in a private letter. [17] A full report of the speech made at the Legislative hearing was printed in the _Banner of Light_, Mar. 12, 1898. The letter to the Boston _Transcript_ in 1894 appeared in the issue of Mar. 24. [18] _James J. Putnam to William James_ BOSTON, _Mar. 9, 1898_. DEAR WILLIAM,--We have thought and talked a good deal about the subject of your speech in the course of the last week. I prepared with infinite labor a letter intended for the _Transcript_ of last Saturday, but it was not a weighty contribution and I am rather glad it was too late to get in. I think it is generally felt among the best doctors that your position was the liberal one, and that it would be a mistake to try to exact an examination of the mind-healers and Christian Scientists. On the other hand, I am afraid most of the doctors, even including myself, do not have any great feeling of fondness for them, and we are more in the way of seeing the fanatical spirit in which they proceed and the harm that they sometimes do than you are. Of course they do also good things which would remain otherwise not done, and that is the important point, and sincere fanatics are almost always, and in this case I think certainly, of real value. Always affectionately, JAMES J. P. [19] That is, there was here no path to follow, only "blazes" on the trees. [20] The housekeeper at the Putnam-Bowditch "shanty." [21] Photograph of a boy and girl standing on a rock which hangs dizzily over a great precipice above the Yosemite Valley. [22] G. E. Woodberry: _The Heart of Man_; 1899. [23] James's house was number 95, his mother-in-law's number 107. [24] Augusta was the house-maid; Dinah, a bull-terrier. [25] It will be recalled that Davidson had a summer School of Philosophy at his place called Glenmore on East Hill, and that East Hill is at one end of Keene Valley. See also James's essay on Thomas Davidson, "A Knight Errant of the Intellectual Life," in _Memories and Studies_. [26] A gift which provided for building the "Harvard Union." [27] "You have never spent a night under our roof, or eaten a meal in our house!" This fictitious charge had become the recognized theme of frequent elaborations. [28] _The World and the Individual_, vol. I. Mrs. Evans was inclined to contend for Royce's philosophy. [29] The name of an American claret which his correspondent had "discovered" and in which it also pleased James to find merit. [30] The second volume of _The World and the Individual_. (Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen.) [31] _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion._ New York, 1900. [32] _Memoiren einer Idealistin_, by Malwida von Meysenbug, Stuttgart, 1877. [33] _Recollections of My Mother_ [Anne Jean Lyman], by Susan I. Lesley, Boston, 1886. [34] Sister Nivedita. [35] Booker T. Washington's _Up from Slavery_. [36] "Frederick Myers's Services to Psychology." Reprinted in _Memories and Studies_. [37] _The Individual, A Study of Life and Death_. New York, 1900. This letter is reproduced from the _Autobiography_ of N. S. Shaler, where it has already been published. [38] Mrs. O. W. Holmes had used the following translation of an epitaph in the Greek Anthology:-- A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast Bids thee take sail. Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost, Weathered the gale. [39] "And base things of the world and things which are despised hath God chosen, yes, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are." [40] Kitchen. [41] Although James had received the usual hint that Harvard intended to confer an honorary degree upon him, he had absented himself from both the honors and fatigues of Commencement time. The next year he was present, and the LL.D. was conferred. [42] "I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read in years has so excited and stimulated my thought. Four years ago I couldn't understand him at all, though I felt his power. I am sure that that philosophy has a great future. It breaks through old _cadres_ and brings things into a solution from which new crystals can be got." (From a letter to Flournoy, Jan. 27, 1902.) [43] The Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality. [44] There had been a celebration of Mrs. Agassiz's eightieth birthday at Radcliffe College, of which she was President. [45] On the Amazon in 1865-66. [46] An 8-page _Syllabus_ printed for the use of his students in the course on the "Philosophy of Nature" which James was giving during the first half of the college year. [47] _Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, by F. W. H. Myers. [48] "The piles driven into the quicksand are too few for such a structure. But it is essential as a preliminary attempt at methodizing, and will doubtless keep a very honorable place in history." To F. C. S. Schiller, April 8, 1903. [49] Eusapia Paladino, the Italian "medium." The physical manifestations which occurred during her trance had excited much discussion. [50] The name of a student-society. [51] The horse. [52] W. E. B. Du Bois: _The Souls of Black Folk_. [53] These five lectures were delivered at the summer school at "Glenmore," which Thomas Davidson had founded. Their subject was "Radical Empiricism as a Philosophy"; but they were neither written out nor reported. [54] _Aristotelian Society Proceedings_, vol. IV, pp. 87-110. [55] James's answers are printed in italics. [56] "How Two Minds Can Know One Thing," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, 1905, vol. II, p. 176. [57] "Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?" _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, 1905, vol. II, p. 235. [58] This address, "La Notion de Conscience," was printed first in the _Archives de Psychologie_, 1905, vol. V, p. 1. It will also be found in the _Essays in Radical Empiricism_. [59] "My own desire to see Roosevelt president here for a limited term of years was quenched by a speech he made at the Harvard Union a couple of years ago." (To D. S. Miller, Jan. 2, 1908.) [60] _The Life of Reason._ New York, 1905. [61] He had been "sounded" regarding an appointment as Harvard Exchange Lecturer at the Sorbonne, and had at first been inclined to accept. [62] Busse, _Leib und Seele, Geist und Körper_; Heymans, _Einführung in die Metaphysik_. [63] _Vide Letters of Henry James_, vol. II, p. 43. [64] "Also outside 'addresses,' impossible to refuse. Damn them! Four in this Hotel [in San Francisco] where I was one of four orators who spoke for two hours on 'Reason and Faith,' before a Unitarian Association of Pacific Coasters. Consequence: _gout_ on waking this morning! _Unitarian gout_--was such a thing ever heard of?" (To T. S. Perry, Feb. 6, 1906.) [65] Dr. Snow kindly wrote an account of the afternoon that he spent in James's company in the city and it may here be given in part. "When I met Professor James in San Francisco early in the afternoon of the day of the earthquake, he was full of questions about my personal feelings and reactions and my observations concerning the conduct and evidences of self-control and fear or other emotions of individuals with whom I had been closely thrown, not only in the medical work which I did, but in the experiences I had on the fire-lines in dragging hose and clearing buildings in advance of the dynamiting squads. "I described to him an incident concerning a great crowd of people who desired to make a short cut to the open space of a park at a time when there was danger of all of them not getting across before certain buildings were dynamited. Several of the city's police had stretched a rope across this street and were volubly and vigorously combating the onrush of the crowd, using their clubs rather freely. Some one cut the rope. At that instant, a lieutenant of the regular army with three privates appeared to take up guard duty. The lieutenant placed his guard and passed on. The three soldiers immediately began their beat, dividing the width of the street among themselves. The crowd waited, breathless, to see what the leaders of the charge upon the police would now do. One man started to run across the street and was knocked down cleverly by the sentry, with the butt of his gun. This sentry coolly continued his patrol and the man sat up, apparently thinking himself wounded, then scuttled back into the crowd, drawing from every one a laugh which was evidently with the soldiers. Immediately, the crowd began to melt away and proceed up a side street in the direction laid out for them. "In connection with this story Professor James casually mentioned that not long before, where there were no soldiers or police, he had run on to a crowd stringing a man to a lamp-post because of his endeavor to rob the body of a woman of some rings. At the time, I did not learn other details of this particular incident, us Professor James was so full of the many scenes he had witnessed and was particularly intent on gathering from me impressions of what I had seen. I suppose he had similarly been gathering observations from others whom he met, "An incident which struck me as humorous at the time was that he should have gathered up a box of "Zu-zu gingersnaps," and, as I recall it, some small pieces of cheese. I do not now recall his comment on where he had obtained these, but there was some humorous incident connected with the transaction, and he was quite happy and of opinion that he was enjoying a nourishing meal. "Professor James told me vividly and in a few words the circumstances of the damage done by the earthquake at Stanford University, and I left him to make arrangements for going down to the University that night to provide for my family. As it turned out, Professor James returned to the campus before I did, and true to his promise thoughtfully hunted up Mrs. Snow and told her that he had seen me and that I was alive and well." [66] James had not used a type-writer since the time when his eyes troubled him in the seventies. The machine now had the fascination of a strange toy again. [67] He did mistake, as Mr. Chesterton's subsequent utterances showed. [68] As to "Jimmy," _vide_ vol. I, p. 301 _supra_. [69] _Cf._ pp. 16, 17, and 220 _supra_. [70] Dr. Miller writes: "These four evenings at the Faculty Club were singularly interesting occasions. One was a meeting of the Philosophical Club of New York, whose members, about a dozen in number, were of different institutions. The others were impromptu meetings arranged either by members of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia or a wider group. At one of them Mr. James sat in a literal circle of chairs, with professors of Biology, Mathematics, etc., as well as Philosophy, and answered in a particularly friendly and charming way the frank objections of a group that were by no means all opponents. At the close, when he was thanked for his patience, he remarked in his humorously disclaiming manner that he was not accustomed to be taken so seriously. Privately he remarked how pleasantly such an unaffected, easy meeting contrasted with a certain formal and august dinner club, the exaggerated amusement of the diners at each other's jokes, etc." [71] His resignation did not take effect until the end of the Academic year, although his last meeting with the class to which he was giving a "half-course," occurred at the mid-year. [72] "La Notion de Conscience," _Archives de Psychologie_, vol. V, No. 17, June, 1905. Later included in _Essays in Radical Empiricism_. [73] "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth." Included in _Selected Essays and Reviews_. [74] The story of the Committee for Mental Hygiene is interestingly told in Part V of the 4th Edition of C. W. Beers's _A Mind that Found Itself_. Several letters from James are incorporated in the story. _Vide_ pp. 339 and 340; also pp. 320, 352. [75] Mrs. James's niece, Rosamund Gregor, age 6. [76] _Memories and Studies_, pp. 286 _et seq._ [77] The reader need hardly be reminded that new meanings and associations have attached themselves to this word in particular. [78] _Talks to Teachers_, p. 265. [79] Proceedings of (English) S.P.R., vol. XXIII, pp. 1-121. Also, Proc. American S.P.R., vol. III, p. 470. [80] _L'Évolution Créatrice._ [81] "A Word More about Truth," reprinted in _Collected Essays and Reviews_. [82] Learned public. [83] Superficial stuff. [84] The lectures were published as _A Pluralistic Universe_. [85] New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908. [86] "The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher," reprinted in _Memories and Studies_ under the title "Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher." [87] By Frank Harris; New York: 1909. [88] See the footnote on p. 39 _supra_.