The Letters of William James, Vol. 1. William James
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 collection26 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?
III
1864-1866
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.27
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."28—"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
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.
See