The Letters of William James, Vol. 2. William James
old Cherubini,—See how brave this girl and boy are in the Yosemite Valley!22 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
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet
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
To Dickinson S. Miller
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,
To Dickinson S. Miller
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,
To
Photograph of a boy and girl standing on a rock which hangs dizzily over a great precipice above the Yosemite Valley.