Kitabı oku: «The Letters of William James, Vol. 1», sayfa 10
To Henry P. Bowditch
BERLIN, Dec. 12, 1867.
BESTER HEINRICH,—I have arrived safely on this side of the ocean and hasten to inform you of the fact.—What a fine pair of young men we are to write so punctually and constantly to each other!—I will not gall you by any sarcasms, however (I naturally think you are more to blame than myself), because (as you naturally are of a similar way of thinking) you might recriminate at great length in your next and much other to-me-more-agreeable matter be crowded out of your letter. Suffice [it] to say that I have thought of you continually, and with undiminished affection, since that bright April morn when we parted; but I am of such an invincibly inert nature as regards letter-writing that it takes a combination of outward and inward circumstances and motives that hardly ever happens, to start me. I wrote you a letter last summer, but destroyed it because I was in such doleful dumps while writing it that it would have given you too unpleasant an impression....
I live near the University, and attend all the lectures on physiology that are given there, but am unable to do anything in the Laboratory, or to attend the cliniques or Virchow's lectures and demonstrations, etc. Du Bois-Raymond, an irascible man of about forty-five, gives a very good and clear, yea, brilliant, series of five lectures a week, and two ambitious young Jews give six more between them which are almost as instructive. The opportunities for study here are superb, it seems to me. Whatever they may be in Paris, they cannot be better. The physiological laboratory, with its endless array of machinery, frogs, dogs, etc., etc., almost "bursts my gizzard," when I go by it, with vexation. The German language is not child's play. I have lately begun to understand almost everything I hear said around me; but I still speak "with a slight foreign accent," as you may suppose—and, with all my practice in reading, do not think I can read more than half as fast as in English. It is very discouraging to get over so little ground. But a steady boring away is bound to fetch it, I suppose; and it seems to me it is worth the trouble.
The general level of thoroughness and exactness in scientific work here is beyond praise; and the abundance of books on every division of every subject something we English have no idea of. It all comes from the thorough mode of educating the people from childhood up. The Staats Examina, before passing which no doctor can practise here in Prussia, exact an amount of physiological, and what we at home call "merely theoretical" knowledge of the candidate, which a young doctor at home would claim and receive especial distinction for having made himself master of. But the men here think it but fair; gird about their loins and set about working their way through. The general impression the Germans make on me is not at all that of a remarkably intellectually gifted people; and if they are not so, their eminence must come solely from their habits of conscientious and plodding work. It may be that their expressionless faces do their minds injustice. I don't know enough of them to decide. But I know the work is a large factor in the result. It makes one repine at the way he has been brought up, to come here. Unhappily most of us come too late to profit by what we see. Bad habits are formed, and life hurries us on too much to stop and drill. But it seems to me that the fact of so many American students being here of late years (they outnumber greatly all other foreign students) ought to have a good influence on the training of the succeeding generation with us. Tuck, Dwight, Dick Derby, Quincy, Townsend, and Heaven knows how many more are in Vienna. Tuck and Dwight write me that they are getting on remarkably well. I saw them both here in September and think T. D. improves a good deal as he grows older.
Berlin is a bleak and unfriendly place. The inhabitants are rude and graceless, but must conceal a solid worth beneath it. I only know seven of them, and they are of the élite. It is very hard getting acquainted with them, as you have to make all the advances yourself; and your antagonist shifts so between friendliness and a drill sergeant's formal politeness that you never know exactly on what footing you stand with him. These Prussians bow in the most amusing way you ever saw,—as if an invisible hand suddenly punched them in the abdomen and an equally invisible foot forthwith kicked them in the rear,—one time and two motions, and they do it 100 times a day.
But enough of national gossip—let us return to that about individuals. Oh! that I could see thy prominent nose and thy sagacious eyes at this moment relieved against the back of that empty arm-chair that stands opposite this table. Oh! that we might once again sit apart from the fretful and insipid herd of our congeners, and take counsel together concerning the world and life—our lives in particular, and all life in general. How the shy goddess would tremble in her hiding-places at the sound of our unerringly approaching voices. And how you would pour into my astonished ear all that is new and wonderful about pathology and microscopical research, all that is sound and neat about operative surgery, while I would recite the most thrilling chapters of Kolliker's "Entwickelungs-geschichte," or Helmholtz's "Innervationsfortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeitsbestimmungen"! I suppose you have been rolling on like a great growing snowball through the vast fields of medical knowledge and are fairly out of the long tunnel of low spirits that leads there by this time. It is only three months since I have taken up medical reading, as I made all sorts of excursions into the language when I came here, and, owing to the slowness of progression I spoke of above, I have not got over much ground. Of course I can never hope to practise; but I shall graduate on my return, and perhaps pick up a precarious and needy living by doing work for medical periodicals or something of that kind—though I hate writing as I do the foul fiend. But I don't want to break off connexion with biological science. I can't be a teacher of physiology, pathology, or anatomy; for I can't do laboratory work, much less microscopical or anatomical. I may get better, but hardly before it will be too late for me to begin school again.
I'll tell you what let's do! Set up a partnership, you to run around and attend to the patients while I will stay at home and, reading everything imaginable in English, German, and French, distil it in a concentrated form into your mind. This division of labor will give the firm an immense advantage over all of our wooden-headed contemporaries. For, in your person, it will have more experience than any one else has time to acquire; and in mine, more learning. We will divide the profits equally, of course; and he who survives the other (you, probably) will inherit the whole. Does not the idea tempt you? If you don't like it, I'll go you halves in the profits in any other feasible way. Seriously, you see I have no very definite plans for the future; but I have enough to keep body and soul together for some years to come, and I see no need of providing for more. This talk of course is only for your "private ear." I want you to write immediately on receipt of this,—for if you don't then, you never will,—and tell me all about what you've been doing and learning and what your future plans are. Also, gossip about the School and Hospital. I have not had a chance to talk medicine with any one but Dwight and Tuck (for a week), and hunger thereafter.... Believe me, ever til deth, your friend
WM. JAMES.
T. S. Perry of '66, who lives with me here, reminds me of a story to tell you. He lived with Architect Ware in Paris, and Ware received a visit from Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Dixwell last summer. The concierge woman was terribly impressed by the personal majesty of your uncles, particularly of Dr. Bowditch, of whom she said: "Il a le grand air, tout à fait comme Christophe Colomb!" It would be curious to understand exactly who and what she thought C. C. was, or whether she would have thought Mr. Dixwell like Americus Vespucius if she had known him.
To O. W. Holmes, Jr
BERLIN, Jan. 3, 1868.
My dear Wendle,—Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin, tonight. The ghosts of the past all start from their unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless whirligig around me so that, after trying in vain to read three books, to sleep, or to think, I clutch the pen and ink and resolve to work off the fit by a few lines to one of the most obtrusive ghosts of all—namely the tall and lank one of Charles Street. Good golly! how I would prefer to have about twenty-four hours talk with you up in that whitely lit-up room—without the sun rising or the firmament revolving so as to put the gas out, without sleep, food, clothing or shelter except your whiskey bottle, of which, or the like of which, I have not partaken since I have been in these longitudes! I should like to have you opposite me in any mood, whether the facetiously excursive, the metaphysically discursive, the personally confidential, or the jadedly cursive and argumentative—so that the oyster-shells which enclose my being might slowly turn open on their rigid hinges under the radiation, and the critter within loll out his dried-up gills into the circumfused ichor of life, till they grew so fat as not to know themselves again. I feel as if a talk with you of any kind could not fail to set me on my legs again for three weeks at least. I have been chewing on two or three dried-up old cuds of ideas I brought from America with me, till they have disappeared, and the nudity of the Kosmos has got beyond anything I have as yet experienced. I have not succeeded in finding any companion yet, and I feel the want of some outward stimulus to my Soul. There is a man named Grimm here whom my soul loves, but in the way Emerson speaks of, i.e. like those people we meet on staircases, etc., and who always ignore our feelings towards them. I don't think we shall ever be able to establish a straight line of communication between us.
I don't know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to finish. What with their heaviness and the damnable slowness with which the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so that I can't enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical work of some kind clamors to be done—and I must still wait!
There! Having worked off that pent-up gall of six weeks' accumulation I feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you—now that the postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double) there remains no shadow of an excuse for not writing—but, still, I don't expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper into the sloughs of the law—yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from time to time gives her goad another turn in the raw she once established between your ribs. Don't let it heal over yet. When I get home let's establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions—to be composed of none but the very topmost cream of Boston manhood. It will give each one a chance to air his own opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and chuckle when he goes home at what damned fools all the other members are—and may grow into something very important after a sufficient number of years.
The German character is without mountains or valleys; its favorite food is roast veal; and in other lines it prefers whatever may be the analogue thereof—all which gives life here a certain flatness to the high-tuned American taste. I don't think any one need care much about coming here unless he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive specialty. I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chapters of physiology. There has a good deal been doing here of late on the physiology of the senses, overlapping perception, and consequently, in a measure, the psychological field. I am wading my way towards it, and if in course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I'll let you know.
I'll now pull up. I don't know whether you take it as a compliment that I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps—perhaps you ought to—you, the one emergent peak, to which I cling when all the rest of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what poor possibility of friendship abides in the crazy frame of W. J. meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as ever to the Common Enemy—and don't forget your ally,
W. J.
That is, after all, all I wanted to write you and it may float the rest of the letter. Pray give my warm regards to your father, mother and sister; and my love to the honest Gray and to Jim Higginson.
[Written on the outside of the envelope.]
Jan. 4. By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage-stamps which are already on the envelope (Economical W!) I don't reopen it. But I will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you! Vide Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX.
To Thomas W. Ward
BERLIN, Jan. —, 1868.
It made me feel quite sad to hear you talk about the inward deadness and listlessness into which you had again fallen in New York. Bate not a jot of heart nor hope, but steer right onward. Take for granted that you've got a temperament from which you must make up your mind to expect twenty times as much anguish as other people need to get along with. Regard it as something as external to you as possible, like the curl of your hair. Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.
I am very glad that you think the methodical habits you must stick to in book-keeping are going to be good discipline to you. I confess to having had a little feeling of spite when I heard you had gone back on science; for I had always thought you would one day emerge into deep and clear water there—by keeping on long enough. But I really don't think it so all-important what our occupation is, so long as we do respectably and keep a clean bosom. Whatever we are not doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoölogy whenever I was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc., etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are about. I don't mean to say that in some occupations we should not have less of it though.
My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically greeted me as the man of calm and clockwork feelings. The reason is that your own vehemence and irregularity was so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter what my private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your mobility, as it were. So I fancy you have always given me credit for less sympathy with you and understanding of your feelings than I really have had. All last winter, for instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment. The appearance of it arose from my reaction against what seemed to me your unduly noisy and demonstrative despair. The fact is, I think, that we have both gone through a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each other in being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particularly logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile temperament; though your physical temperament being so much more tremendous than mine makes a great quantitative difference both in your favor, and against you, as the case may be.
Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes a work which shall by its mere exercise interest him and at the same time allow him to feel that through it he takes hold of the reality of things—whatever that may be—in some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can only choose a business in which the evil of feeling restless shall be at a minimum, and then go ahead and make the best of it. That minimum will grow less every year.—In this connection I will again refer to a poem you probably know: "A Grammarian's Funeral," by R. Browning, in "Men and Women." It always strengthens my backbone to read it, and I think the feeling it expresses of throwing upon eternity the responsibility of making good your one-sidedness somehow or other ("Leave now for dogs and apes, Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable.
The other requirement is hard theoretically, though practically not so hard as the first. All I can tell you is the thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which, like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world; and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and pain of different kinds. For even at one's lowest ebb of belief, the fact remains empirically certain (and by our will we can, if not absolutely refrain from looking beyond that empirical fact, at least practically and on the whole accept it and let it suffice us)—that men suffer and enjoy. And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of God anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause; and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. Individuals can add to the welfare of the race in a variety of ways. You may delight its senses or "taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it by discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by concocting a new patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of machinery, or by some new application of a natural product. You may open a road, help start some social or business institution, contribute your mite in any way to the mass of the work which each generation subtracts from the task of the next; and you will come into real relations with your brothers—with some of them at least.
I know that in a certain point of view, and the most popular one, this seems a cold activity for our affections, a stone instead of bread. We long for sympathy, for a purely personal communication, first with the soul of the world, and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are they who think, or know, that they have got them! But to those who must confess with bitter anguish that they are perfectly isolated from the soul of the world, and that the closest human love encloses a potential germ of estrangement or hatred, that all personal relation is finite, conditional, mixed (vide in Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc., etc.), it may not prove such an unfruitful substitute. At least, when you have added to the property of the race, even if no one knows your name, yet it is certain that, without what you have done, some individuals must needs be acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have modified their life; you are in real relation with them; you have in so far forth entered into their being. And is that such an unworthy stake to set up for our good, after all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even apart from the physical link of generation, have made us what we are. Every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers. Everything we know and are is through men. We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However mean a man may be, man is the best we know; and your loathing as you turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life—your homesick yearning for a Better, somewhere—is furnished by your manhood; your ideal is made up of traits suggested by past men's words and actions. Your manhood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts like an overarching sky—and all the Good and True and High and Dear that you know by virtue of your sharing in it. They are the Natural Product of our Race. So that it seems to me that a sympathy with men as such, and a desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which, whatever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as good, may very well form an external interest sufficient to keep one's moral pot boiling in a very lively manner to a good old age. The idea, in short, of becoming an accomplice in a sort of "Mankind its own God or Providence" scheme is a practical one.
I don't mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come to that, I only say it is a mode of envisaging life; which is capable of affording moral support—and may at any rate help to bridge over the despair of skeptical intervals. I confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset me for a couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept me from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook or crook, long enough, I might make my nick, however small a one, in the raw stuff the race has got to shape, and so assert my reality. The stoic feeling of being a sentinel obeying orders without knowing the general's plans is a noble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral culture (Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they may all help to ballast the same man.
What a preacher I'm getting to be! I had no idea when I sat down to begin this long letter that I was going to be carried away so far. I feel like a humbug whenever I endeavor to enunciate moral truths, because I am at bottom so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off "views" to you, because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by any accidental point of view or formula which you may not exactly have struck on before (e.g., what you write me of the effect of that sentence of your mother's about marrying). I had no idea this morning that I had so many of the elements of a Pascal in me. Excuse the presumption.—But to go back. I think that in business as well as in science one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I have been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of my past life—which has been prejudicial to my education, and by telling me which, and by making me understand it some years ago, some one might have conferred a great benefit on me—is an impatience of results. Inexperience of life is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an American characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord, from a long enough daily work at a given matter; and I think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the primary interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the intellectual realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret of German prowess therein. Have confidence, even when you seem to yourself to be making no progress, that, if you but go on in your own uninteresting way, they must bloom out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think I must pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip to thee of our life here....
