The Letters of William James, Vol. 2. William James
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,
To Henry Holt, Esq
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,
To his Class at Radcliffe College which had sent a potted azalea to him at Easter
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,
To Henry James
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,
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
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