Kitabı oku: «The Letters of William James, Vol. 1», sayfa 8

To his Father

BERLIN, Sept. 5, 1867.

My beloved old Dad,—…I think it will be just as well for you not to say anything to any of the others about what I shall tell you of my condition hitherto, as it will only give them useless pain, and poor Harry especially (who evidently from his letters runs much into that utterly useless emotion, sympathy, with me) had better remain ignorant.... My confinement to my room and inability to indulge in any social intercourse drove me necessarily into reading a great deal, which in my half-starved and weak condition was very bad for me, making me irritable and tremulous in a way I have never before experienced. Two evenings which I spent out, one at Gerlach's, the other at Thies's, aggravated my dorsal symptoms very much, and as I still clung to the hope of amelioration from repose, I avoided going out to the houses where it was possible. Although I cannot exactly say that I got low-spirited, yet thoughts of the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention, and I began to think that some change, even if a hazardous one, was necessary. It was at that time that Dr. Carus advised Teplitz. While there, owing to the weakening effects of the baths, both back and stomach got worse if anything; but the beautiful country and a number of drives which I thought myself justified in taking made me happy as a king.... I have purposely hitherto written fallacious accounts of my state home, to produce a pleasant impression on you all—but you may rely on the present one as literally certain, and as it makes the others after all only premature, I don't see what will be the use of impairing the family confidence in my letters by saying anything about it to them. I have no doubt that you will consider the Teplitz expenditure justified, as I do. My sickness has added some other items in the way of medicine and cab hire to the expenses of my life in Dresden, but nothing very considerable. So much for biz.

I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times carefully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has always hung over what you have written on these subjects is hardly at all cleared up. Every sentence seems written from a point of view which I nowhere get within range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of questions which are visible from my present view. My questions, I know, belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal entirely with the "natural constitution" of things; but I find it impossible to step out from them into relation with "spiritual" facts, and the very language you use ontologically is also so extensively rooted in the finite and phenomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its mechanical sense, when it becomes to me devoid of significance. I feel myself in fact more and more drifting towards the sensationalism closed in by skepticism—but the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst of it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking I may one day get a glimpse of things through the ontological window. At present it is walled up. I can understand now no more than ever the world-wide gulf you put between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably entangled together, and seem to grow from a common stem—and no theory of creation seems to me to make things clearer. I cannot logically understand your theory. You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which the alienation is produced (but phenomenal to what? to the already unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected alienation a real movement of return follows. But how can the real movement have its rise in the phenomenal? And if it does not, it seems to me the creation is the very arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole process is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand what you mean by the descent of the creator into nature; you don't explain it, and it seems to be the kernel of the whole.

You speak sometimes of our natural life as our whole conscious life; sometimes of our consciousness as composed of both elements, finite and infinite. If our real life is unconscious, I don't see how you can occupy in the final result a different place from the Stoics, for instance. These are points on which I have never understood your position, and they will doubtless make you smile at my stupidity; but I cannot help it. I ought not to write about them in such a hurry, for I have been expecting every moment to see Tom Dwight come in, with whom I promised to go to the theatre. I arrived here late last night. My back will prevent my studying physiology this winter at Leipsig, which I rather hoped to do. I shall stay here if I can. If unable to live here and cultivate the society of the natives without a greater moral and dorsal effort than my shattered frame will admit, I will retreat to Vienna where, knowing so many Americans, I shall find social relaxation without much expense of strength. Dwight has come. Much love from your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

To O. W. Holmes, Jr

BERLIN, Sept. 17, 1867.

My dear Wendle,—I was put in the possession, this morning, by a graceful and unusual attention on the part of the postman, of a letter from home containing, amongst other valuable matter, a precious specimen of manuscript signed "O. W. H. Jr." covering just one page of small note paper belonging to a letter written by Minny Temple!!!!! Now I myself am not proud,—poverty, misery and philosophy have together brought me to a pass where there are few actions so shabby that I would not commit them if thereby I could relieve in any measure my estate, or lighten the trouble of living,—but, by Jove, Sir! there is a point, sunt certi denique fines, down to which it seems to me hardly worth while to condescend—better give up altogether.—I do not intend any personal application. Men differ, thank Heaven! and there may be some constituted in such a fearful and wonderful manner, that to write to a friend after six months, in another person's letter, hail him as "one of the pillars on which life rests," and after twelve lines stop short, seems to them an action replete with beauty and credit. To me it is otherwise. And if perchance, O Wendy boy, there lurked in any cranny of thy breast a spark of consciousness, a germ of shame at the paltriness of thy procedure as thou inditedst that pitiful apology for a letter, I would fain fan it, nourish it, till thy whole being should become one incarnate blush, one crater of humiliation. Mind, I should not have found fault with you if you had not written at all. There would have been a fine brutality about that which would have commanded respect rather than otherwise—certainly not pity. 'Tis that, writing, THAT should be the result. Bah!

But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to provoke you to recrimination in your next letter. Let it be as substantial and succulent as the last, with its hollow hyperbolic expression of esteem, was the opposite, and I assure you that the past shall be forgotten.—I am, as you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck," bodily. I left home without telling anyone about it, because, hoping I might get well, I wanted to keep it a secret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I thought of telling you "in confidence," but refrained, partly because walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because of the habit of secrecy that had grown on me in six months. I dare say Harry has kept you supplied with information respecting my history up to the present time, and perhaps read you portions of my letters. My history, internal and external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally uneventful. The external, with the exception of three R. R. voyages (to and from Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles that of a sea anemone; and the internal, notwithstanding the stimulus of a new language and country, has contracted the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to be the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and solitude; and when the bodily condition is such that muscular and cerebral activity not only remain unexcited, but are solicited, by an idiotic hope of recovery, to crass indolence, the "elasticity" of one's spirits can't be expected to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired Harry's pluck more and more. Pain, however intense, is light and life, compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct, and where your "conscience," in the form of an aspiration towards recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced "must be felt to be appreciated."

I have been in this city ten days and hope to stay all winter. I have got a comfortable room near the University and will attempt to follow some of the lectures. My wish was to study physiology practically, but I shall not be able. The number of subjects and fractions of subjects on which courses of lectures are given here and at the other universities would make you stare. Berlin is a "live" place, with a fine, tall, intelligent-looking population, infinitely better-looking than that of Dresden. I like the Germans very much, so far (which is not far at all) as I have got to know them. The apophthegm, "a fat man consequently a good man," has much of truth in it. The Germans come out strong on their abdomens,—even when these are not vast in capacity, one feels that they are of mighty powerful construction, and play a much weightier part in the economy of the man than with us,—affording a massive, immovable background to the consciousness, over which, as on the surface of a deep and tranquil sea, the motley images contributed by the other senses to life's drama glide and play without raising more than a pleasant ripple,—while with us, who have no such voluminous background, they forever touch bottom, or come out on the other side, or kick up such a tempest and fury that we enjoy no repose. The Germans have leisure, kindness to strangers, a sort of square honesty, and an absence of false shame and damned pecuniary pretension that makes intercourse with them very agreeable. The language is infernal; and I seem to be making no progress beyond the stage in which one just begins to misunderstand and to make one's self misunderstood. The scientific literature is even richer than I thought. In literature proper, Goethe's "Faust" seems to me almost worth learning the language for.

I wish I could communicate to you some startling discoveries regarding our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos, made since I have been here. But I actually haven't had a fresh idea. And my reading until six weeks ago, having been all in German, covered very little ground. For the past six weeks I have, by medical order, been relaxing my brain on French fiction, and am just returning to the realities of life, German and Science. If you want to be consoled, refreshed, and reconciled to the Kosmos, the whole from a strictly abdominal point of view, read "L'Ami Fritz," and "Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette," etc., by Erckmann-Chatrian. They are books of gold, so don't read them till you are just in the mood and all other wisdom is of no avail. Then they will open the skies to you.

On looking back over this letter I perceive I have unwittingly been betrayed into a more gloomy tone than I intended, and than would convey a faithful impression of my usual mental condition—in which occur moments of keen enjoyment. The contemplation of my letter of credit alone makes me chuckle for hours. If I ever have leisure I will write an additional Bridgewater, illustrating the Beneficence and Ingenuity, etc., in providing me with a letter of credit when so many poor devils have none. There, I have again unintentionally fallen into a vein of irony—I do not mean it. I am full of hope in the future.

My back, etc., are far better since I have been in Teplitz; in fact I feel like a new man. I have several excellent letters to people here, and when they return from the country, when T. S. Perry arrives for the winter, when the lectures get a-going, and I get thinking again, when long letters from you and the rest of my "friends" (ha! ha!) arrive regularly at short intervals—I shall mock the state of kings. You had better believe I have thought of you with affection at intervals since I have been away, and prized your qualities of head, heart, and person, and my priceless luck in possessing your confidence and friendship in a way I never did at home; and cursed myself that I didn't make more of you when I was by you, but, like the base Indian, threw evening after evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom, your golden jibes, your costly imagery, listening to your shuddering laughter, baptizing myself afresh, in short, in your friendship—the thought of all this makes me even now forget your epistolary peculiarities. But pray, my dear old Wendell, let me have one letter from you—tell me how your law business gets on, of your adventures, thoughts, discoveries (even though but of mares' nests, they will be interesting to your Williams); books read, good stories heard, girls fallen in love with—nothing can fail to please me, except your failing to write. Please give my love to John Gray, Jim Higginson and Henry Bowditch. Tell H. B. I will write to him very soon; but that is no reason why he should not write to me without waiting, and tell me about himself and medicine in Boston. Give my very best regards also to your father, mother and sister. And believe me ever your friend,

WM. JAMES.

P. S. Why can't you write me the result of your study of the vis viva question? I have not thought of it since I left. I wish very much you would, if the trouble be not too great. Anyhow you could write the central formulas without explication, and oblige yours. Excuse the scrawliness of this too hurriedly written letter.

To Henry James

BERLIN, Sept. 26, 1867.

Beloved 'Arry,—I hope you will not be severely disappointed on opening this fat envelope to find it is not all letter. I will first explain to you the nature of the enclosed document and then proceed to personal matters. The other day, as I was sitting alone with my deeply breached letter of credit, beweeping my outcast state, and wondering what I could possibly do for a living, it flashed across me that I might write a "notice" of H. Grimm's novel which I had just been reading. To conceive with me is to execute, as you well know. And after sweating fearfully for three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying, etc., etc., I have just succeeded in finishing the enclosed. I want you to read it, and if, after correcting the style and thoughts, with the aid of Mother, Alice and Father, and rewriting it if possible, you judge it to be capable of interesting in any degree anyone in the world but H. Grimm, himself, to send it to the "Nation" or the "Round Table."

I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this price. Style is not my forte, and to strike the mean between pomposity and vulgar familiarity is indeed difficult. Still, an the rich guerdon accrue, an but ten beauteous dollars lie down on their green and glossy backs within the family treasury in consequence of my exertions, I shall feel glad that I have made them. I have not seen Grimm yet as he is in Switzerland. In his writings he is possessed of real imagination and eloquence, chiefly in an ethical line, and the novel is really distingué, somewhat as Cherbuliez's are, only with rather a deficiency on the physical and animal side. He is, to my taste, too idealistic, and Father would scout him for his arrant moralism. Goethe seems to have mainly suckled him, and the manner of this book is precisely that of "Wilhelm Meister" or "Elective Affinities." There is something not exactly robust about him, but, per contra, great delicacy and an extreme belief in the existence and worth of truth and desire to attain it justly and impartially. In short, a rather painstaking liberality and want of careless animal spirits—which, by the bye, seem to be rather characteristics of the rising generation. But enough of him. The notice was mere taskwork. I could not get up a spark of interest in it, and I should not think it would be d'actualité for the "Nation." Still, I could think of nothing else to do, and was bound to do something.³⁵ …

I am a new man since I have been here, both from the ruddy hues of health which mantle on my back, and from the influence of this live city on my spirits. Dresden was a place in which it always seemed afternoon; and as I used to sit in my cool and darksome room, and see through the ancient window the long dusty sunbeams slanting past the roof angles opposite down into the deep well of a street, and hear the distant droning of the market and think of no reason why it should not thus continue in secula seculorum, I used to have the same sort of feeling as that which now comes over me when I remember days passed in Grandma's old house in Albany. Here, on the other hand, it is just like home. Berlin, I suppose, is the most American-looking city in Europe. In the quarter which I inhabit, the streets are all at right angles, very broad, with dusty trees growing in them, houses all new and flat-roofed, covered with stucco, and of every imaginable irregularity in height, bleak, ugly, unsettled-looking—werdend. Germany is, I find, as a whole (I hardly think more experience will change my opinion), very nearly related to our country, and the German nature and ours so akin in fundamental qualities, that to come here is not much of an experience. There is a general colorlessness and bleakness about the outside look of life, and in artistic matters a wide-spread manifestation of the very same creative spirit that designs our kerosene-lamp models, for instance, at home. Nothing in short that is worth making a pilgrimage to see. To travel in Italy, in Egypt, or in the Tropics, may make creation widen to one's view; but to one of our race all that is peculiar in Germany is mental, and that Germany can be brought to us....

(After dinner.) I have just been out to dine. I am gradually getting acquainted with all the different restaurants in the neighborhood, of which there are an endless number, and will presently choose one for good,—certainly not the one where I went today, where I paid 25 Groschen for a soup, chicken and potatoes, and was almost prevented from breathing by the damned condescension of the waiters. I fairly sigh for a home table. I used to find a rather pleasant excitement in dining "round," that is long since played out. Could I but find some of the honest, florid and ornate ministers that wait on you at the Parker House, here, I would stick to their establishment, no matter what the fare. These indifferent reptiles here, dressed in cast-off wedding-suits, insolent and disobliging and always trying to cheat you in the change, are the plague of my life. After dinner I took quite a long walk under the Linden and round by the Palace and Museum. There are great numbers of statues (a great many of them "equestrian") here, and you have no idea how they light up the place. What you say about the change of the seasons wakens an echo in my soul. Today is really a harbinger of winter, and felt like an October day at home, with a northwest wind, cold and crisp with a white light, and the red leaves falling and blowing everywhere. I expect T. S. Perry in a week. We shall have a very good large parlor and bedroom, together, in this house, and steer off in fine style right into the bowels of the winter. I expect it to be a stiff one, as everyone speaks of it here with a certain solemnity....

I wish you would articulately display to me in your future letters the names of all the books you have been reading. "A great many books, none but good ones," is provokingly vague. On looking back at what I have read since I left home, it shows exceeding small, owing in great part I suppose to its being in German. I have just got settled down again—after a nearly-two-months' debauch on French fiction, during which time Mrs. Sand, the fresh, the bright, the free; the somewhat shrill but doughty Balzac, who has risen considerably in my esteem or rather in my affection; Théophile Gautier the good, the golden-mouthed, in turn captivated my attention; not to speak of the peerless Erckmann-Chatrian, who renews one's belief in the succulent harmonies of creation—and a host of others. I lately read Diderot, "Œuvres Choisies," 2 vols., which are entertaining to the utmost from their animal spirits and the comic modes of thinking, speaking and behaving of the time. Think of meeting continually such delicious sentences as this,—he is speaking of the educability of beasts,—"Et peut-on savoir jusqu'où l'usage des mains porterait les singes s'ils avaient le loisir comme la faculté d'inventer, et si la frayeur continuelle que leur inspirent les hommes ne les retenait dans l'abrutissement"!!! But I must pull up, as I have to write to Father still....

Adieu, lots of love from your aff.

WILHELM.

The preceding letter shows James as but recently arrived in Berlin and as arranging himself there for a winter of physiology at the University. He was soon joined by his young compatriot Thomas Sergeant Perry, an intimate friend of earlier Newport days and of the subsequent Boston and Cambridge years, and the two young Americans set up joint lodgings at Number 12 in the Mittelstrasse. Although James's main purpose was to work at the University, he was luckily not without social resources. George Bancroft, the historian and former Secretary of the Navy and Minister to England, was at this time representing the United States in Berlin and was an old family acquaintance. His and another hospitable family, the Louis Thieses, who had been Cambridge neighbors and whose house in Quincy Street the James parents had acquired upon Mr. Thies's return to his native land, were a link with home, and at the same time rendered hospitable services to James by helping him to a few German acquaintances. By far the most congenial and interesting of these was Herman Grimm, the son of the younger of the universally beloved brothers of the Fairy Tales. Herman Grimm had married Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, and was at this time a man of just past forty years. Professor of the History of Art in the University of Berlin, essayist, author of "The Life of Michael Angelo" and of Lectures on Goethe as well as of several works of fiction, Grimm was a versatile and charming specimen of that "learned" Germany which we now think of as flourishing most amiably during the generation that preceded the Franco-Prussian War. The easy and cordial way in which his household accepted James appears, as in the next letter, to have been richly appreciated.