The Letters of William James, Vol. 2. William James

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 revelation9 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 4½ 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 СКАЧАТЬ