XV (continued 2)

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.