SOURCE: "Father and Son: Style and Criticism," in The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. I: Inheritance and Vocation, Little, Brown, and Company, 1935, pp. 125-45.

[In the following excerpt from the first part of his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The Thought and Character of William James, Perry assesses James, Sr. 's literary style and his critical methods and theories. The critic also discusses the elder James's influence on his son William, both personally and professionally.]

[For Henry James, Sr.] the most natural form of art, if art it can be called, was talk. Of all the arts, unless it be dancing, talk is the directest and most contemporaneous form of expression, the least detached and externalized. It is infused with bodily heat: like a blush or a gesture it reflects the feeling and the insight of the moment as it passes. The style of the natural talker is emphatic and mobile—meant to be listened to, with a brief and constantly shifting focus of attention, and not designed for contemplation. When this style is transferred from the spoken to the written word, it takes on an aspect of exaggeration, so that while James's talk was full-blooded, his writing at times seems plethoric. Nevertheless, as representing style of this intensely vital sort, he ranks high among English writers, despite the forbidding character of his subject matter. It is doubtful if Carlyle or Melville could have done better with James's theme. He was a humane Carlyle, an optimistic Melville, writing on theology and metaphysics.

His two elder sons, to each of whom style was a vocation, have set down their impressions of their father's peculiar quality. His books, resembling his talk and his character, could not fail, says Henry [in Notes of a Son and Brother], "to flush with the strong colour, colour so remarkably given and not taken, projected and not reflected, colour of thought and faith and moral and expressional atmosphere." We find him, says William [in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James], "in the effortless possession of that style . . . which, to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters, rather than that of an American of today."

Wilkinson not only knew James but could himself vibrate to the same pitch. "As to the style and manner of your paper," he wrote to his friend in 1850, "it is the best that I have seen even from you; full of consecutiveness, throwing up the right images in the right places, and warm and stroke-full with your choicest blood and animal spirits." And, later, "If eulogy were necessary, I could tell you how I have been dragged along at the chariot-wheels of your snorting-sentences, with my hair all streaming out behind, while you were lashing on the speed in front; an attempt too ineffectual, to go my own way, while fastened by the feet to your impetuosity."

The visceral quality of James's style must not be taken to mean a lack of artistry. He had what can only be described as a command of the English language. He creates the impression of using language, or even of abusing it, rather than of accommodating himself to it. He departs from accepted usage in phrase and word, but always willfully—as though to say, "This is mine, and I may do with it what I like." Or, if this makes his procedure appear more self-conscious than it was, then let us say that in the heat of his conviction language was melted out of its stereotyped forms and remoulded or even amalgamated to his thought. Artful he certainly was not. But he had the artist's gift and the artist's flare. Once started on a period he elaborated and embroidered with evident creative joy. He let himself go.

He had a special, almost obsessive, interest in portraiture, and this sometimes betrayed him. The following letter from Dr. Holmes refers to James's acknowledged gift of representation:—

Boston, April 27, 1881

My dear Mr. James,—

You must let me, for my own sake, tell you what keen delight I enjoyed in reading your paper on Carlyle in the Atlantic [Vol. XLVII (1881)]. It is a very long time since any article in any of the reviews and magazines which now hold so much of the boldest and most brilliant thought of the time has given me so many thrills of pleasure. There is a great deal of truth to be told about Carlyle, who, whatever else he was, had the one quality of being an interesting character to study. One portrait cannot give the whole of him, but for a single portrait I doubt if any will be as effective, as well as truthful, as your own. If Rembrandt were alive to add his face as he would paint it, the pen and the brush would seem to belong together. Faithfully and sincerely yours,

O. W. HOLMES

Rembrandtesque he no doubt was, but without that master's balance. He seized some aspect of his subject which coincided with his present emphasis of feeling or conviction, and subordinated the rest. Hence, while his portraits were bold, their coloring was sometimes livid, and their extravagant emphasis gave them the quality of a cartoon or even of a caricature.

Despite his acknowledged mastery of style, it was a common complaint that James was obscure. He spoke and wrote as one having a message too great for his powers of expression. Benjamin Paul Blood, of Amsterdam, New York, whom we shall meet again as one of William James's discoveries, wrote to the latter in 1882: "I have a fancy for your family name. The first man of genius I ever saw alive was Henry James. It is a long while ago. He preached in the Presbyterian Church here. I received the impression that he was not a regular minister. And I forget the topic, but he seemed overpowered at the impossibility of uttering something. I remember that he thrilled me, and was badly 'enthused' himself. But he had that knack of saying the whole of a thing in a few words that has since been a study with me. . . ."

"Oh, that I might thunder it out," James once exclaimed, "in a single interjection that would tell the whole of it, and never speak a word again!" [quoted in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James]. Despite that gift for instantaneous wholeness to which Blood testifies, he found himself compelled to return again and again to the same task, and neither he nor his audience ever felt that he had said what it was in him to say. Obscurity was the price he paid for being a philosopher. Both his talk and his writing were the vehicle of his ideas, and these ideas were inherently difficult to grasp. He was not satisfied to communicate anything less than their full depth and subtlety. No one could understand him who was not prepared to think as searchingly and as boldly as he did. There were many, therefore, who found his manner and his wit entertaining but were baffled by his doctrines, feeling that there was a recondite and hidden meaning that escaped them—as indeed there was.

James's very versatility hampered his achievement. His son Henry felt his style was "too philosophic for life, and at the same time too living .. . for thought" [in Notes of a Son and Brother]. His doctrinal and intellectual preoccupation stood in his way not only as a man of letters, but as a practical or emotional leader of men; he was too dialectical to be a seer, and too fervid and dogmatic to be a philosopher of the modern critical school; while as to being the founder of a new religion, he had, alas! too good a sense of humor.

That William James resembled his father in personal flavor and genius is unescapable. It was said of his father that he was "aninted with the isle of Patmos"—that he was, in other words, both Hibernian and apocalyptic. The son was not apocalyptic, but he was Hibernian. Like his father he was warm-blooded, effervescent, and tenderly affectionate. Both men were unstable and impatient, though in neither case did this quality prevent long periods of intense and fruitful application. Alice James testified to this common quality of her father and her brother. She was writing in 1889 of William's European wanderings: "William, instead of going to Switzerland, came suddenly back from Paris and went home, having, as usual, exhausted Europe in a few weeks, finding it stale, flat and unprofitable. The only necessity being to get home, the first letter after his arrival, was, of course, full of plans for his return plus wife and infants; he is just like a blob of mercury—you can't put a mental finger upon him. Harry and I were laughing over him, and recalling Father, and William's resemblance (in his ways) to him. Though the results are the same, they seem to come from such a different nature in the two; in William, an entire inability or indifference to 'stick to a thing for the sake of sticking,' as someone said of him once; whilst Father, the delicious infant! couldn't submit even to the thralldom of his own whim; and then the dear being was such a prey to the demon homesickness."

According to the daughter's judgment the cause in the father's case was a sort of rebelliousness against control, and in the son's case a chronic infirmity of will—the lack of a capacity for laborious routine. Beyond a similarity of temperamental physiognomy which is immediately recognizable, any explanation in terms of deeper biological causes must remain entirely speculative. Both were fond of laughter. Both were men of extreme spontaneity, with a tendency to embellishment and immoderate affirmation; both were mobile or even erratic in a degree that made it impossible for them to drive readily in harness or to engage easily in organized, long-range, institutionalized activity.

Based on this sameness are two marked differences. The father was fundamentally robust, the son relatively frail, with long periods of bodily disability and neurasthenia. There was more of sheer aboriginal force in the father, while the son depended more on the temper and edge of his instruments. The other difference is no less unmistakable, but more difficult to describe. The father was, as we have seen, an eccentric. His originality was more self-contained—he conceded less. William James was more mundane, more highly socialized, and had more of what men call "taste." He had queer ideas, but he was not queer. With all his philosophical detachment he knew instinctively how to meet the world on its own terms, how to make himself understood, and how to be free and spirited without ever transgressing the accepted norms of convention or polite intercourse. While the father had his moments of spiritual inebriety, the son was more securely restrained. There was a warm and explosive emotionality in both men, but in the son the outward expression was further removed from the central fire—more highly elaborated and more subtly controlled.

Their similarity of temperament predisposed father and son to the same style of utterance. William was also a talking writer, with a genius for picturesque epithets, and a tendency to vivid coloring and extreme freedom of manner. William, too, was one who wrote primarily in order to express convictions, giving the result a peculiar quality of sincerity. Like his father he presented philosophy in the form of literature, and invited the attention of lovers of literature, who thereupon found themselves unequal to the philosophy. Hence W. D. Howells, accustomed to literature rather than to philosophy, found that William's Pragmatism was brilliant but not clear, "like his father, who wrote the Secret of Swedenborg and kept it." Both, when once launched upon the expression of a conviction, became interested in the expression for its own sake, and were also disposed to exaggeration by a sort of gathering enthusiasm, as though the blood were warmed by exercise. But while both were necessarily obscure to the one who, finding entertainment and looking for more of it, was in no mood to think metaphysically, there was a difference. The son might be puzzling, but he was not, like the father, recondite or cryptic. He had a better control of his instrument and an infinitely better understanding of his audience. The father was quite capable of delivering jeremiads to an unhearing or even unlistening age; the son would have found any unreciprocal and noncommunicating relation intolerable.

The outstanding fact is the son's loving admiration of his father as a man. It was not only a filial love—it was an idealizing love. He loved the kind of man his father was. And such being the fact he could not fail to grow like him, in his habits, his feelings, his appraisals, his attitudes. There is a letter written by William four days before his father's death and never read by him to whom it was addressed:—

In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure that there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating,—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence. .. . As for us; we shall live on each in his way,—feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and .. . try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my sympathy with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade—and not for the sake of regrets. .. . It comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don't see you again—Farewell! a blessed farewell!

Turning from the man to his ideas, it is natural to speak first of the elder James as a critic. He criticized by the application of his doctrines, and this procedure was peculiarly characteristic of him. But in his criticism, much of it impromptu, his doctrines appear in the closest fusion with his personal traits.

First of all, he was a critic, an inveterate critic, both of men and of ideas. Criticism pervaded his talk; and the interest of his talk lay largely in the fact that he had emphatic, startling, not to say sensational, opinions on any topic that arose. In stating these opinions he was no respecter of persons. Never was a man more opinionative than he who believed that "the curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd, abominable opinionativeness it engenders!" [in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James]. "Truth," he said, is "essentially combative"—and he evidently rejoiced in the fact.

The following random recollections of Mrs. James T. Fields will convey something of the quality of the criticism that came most naturally to his lips: "Mr. James looked like an invalid, but was full of spirit and kindness. He not infrequently speaks severely of men and things. Analysis is his second nature. . . . He didn't fail to whip the pusillanimous clergy, and as the room was overstocked with them, it was odd to watch the effect. Mr. James is perfectly brave, almost inapprehensive, of the storm of opinion he raises." He seemed to take a special pleasure in baiting Bronson Alcott, whether in his presence or in his absence: "They got into a great battle about the premises, during which Mr. Alcott talked of the Divine paternity as relating to himself, when Mr. James broke in with, 'My dear sir, you have not found your maternity yet. You are an egg half hatched. The shells are yet sticking about your head.' To this Mr. Alcott replied, 'Mr. James, you are damaged goods and will come up damaged goods in eternity'. .. . He [Mr. James] said: 'In Mr. Alcott the moral sense was wholly dead, and the aesthetic sense had never yet been born!'"

In his journal for August 1853, Emerson refers to James's criticism of Thackeray, who was at that time in New York: "In New York, Henry James quoted Thackeray's speeches in society, 'He liked to go to Westminster Abbey, to say his prayers,' etc. 'It gave him the comfort,—blest feeling'.... He thought Thackeray could not see beyond his eyes, and has no ideas, and merely is a sounding-board against which his experiences thump and resound: he is the merest boy."

Two more examples of James's free handling of personalities, the first in a letter to Mrs. James T. Fields: "I am reading Theodore Parker's life with edification. I can't help feeling continually what a capital thing it had been for Theodore if he could only once or twice have honestly suspected what a poor puddle after all his life was, even when it most reflected his busy activity. But this is strictly between ourselves, as the saints must have public reverence."

The second is extracted from a letter written in 1868 to Wilkinson, who has just seen Elizabeth Peabody in London: "Elizabeth Peabody is a very odd personage in every point of view, as you must have observed; but her judgment in my estimation is her feeblest part. She is enthusiastic for everything exceptional, and has a contempt for the commonplace which will condemn her to dark corners to all eternity, if she doesn't look out betimes."

As can easily be imagined, James's methods of criticism have not always been approved. Referring to the relatively flattering picture of Hawthorne contained in the Saturday Club letter of 1861, Hawthorne's biographer speaks of "the late Henry James" as "a humorous rhetorician, over-frank in his besprinkling of adjectives, which sometimes escaped the syringe at random, and hit no mark" [quoted in F. B. Sanborn's "The Friendships of Hawthorne," in The Hawthorne Centenary, 1905]. It will be recalled that in speaking of his friend's harsh comments on Carlyle, Emerson accused him of a "passion for perversity." But James's attacks were neither random nor perverse. They were reckless, but they invariably had a meaning and pointed a moral. They were for the most part directed against arrogance or complacency. As William James said [in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James], "Nothing so endlessly besotted in Mr. James's eyes, as the pretension to possess personally any substantive merit or advantage whatever, any worth other than your unconscious uses to your kind! Nothing pleased him like exploding the bubbles of conventional dignity, unless it was fraternizing on the simplest and commonest plane with all lowly persons whom he met. To exalt humble and abase proud things was ever the darling sport of his conversation,—a conversation the somewhat reckless invective humor of which, when he was in the abasing mood, often startled the good people of Boston, who did not know him well enough to see the endlessly genial and humane intuition from which the whole mood flowed."

William James went on to quote the opinion that his father's "abasing" was at bottom an abasement of himself: "He was of such an immense temperament, that when you took him to task for violating the feelings of others in his talk, he would score you black and blue for your distinctions; and all the while he made you feel that the origin of the matter was his divine rage with himself at still being so dominated by his natural selfhood which would not be shaken off. I have felt in him at times, away down at bottom of the man, so sheer a humility and self-abasement as to give me an idea of infinity." In other words, there is a phase of spiritual development in which man must first learn to despise the very selfhood which he has first to acquire; and James's amiable ferocity was an exercise in contempt for selfhood, on his own part and in behalf of others. I have been tempted to say that his attacks were impersonal. Perhaps it would be better to say that they were merely personal, for he continued to smile lovingly upon the universal humanity incarnate in the individual object of his disapprobation.

If there was an implied philosophy in James's extemporaneous derogation of persons, there was an explicit philosophy in his more deliberate criticism. There was, in the first place, a clearly recognizable attitude to art. Inasmuch as, of his two oldest sons, William had a predilection for the art of painting and Henry for the art of letters, this was a matter of some importance in the domestic circle. Fundamentally, James's disparagement of art expressed his sense of the overwhelming importance of religion. This, I take it, underlay his reiterated opinion that art was too "narrowing"—literature, or any other art, is so much less than life! His comments on Italy suggest that he had a weakness for art. He was writing in 1869 to his son Henry, who was then discovering Italy and was overwhelmed with shameless joy. In its half-guilty turning from pleasing spectacles to reform and salvation, this passage is as profoundly characteristic of the son William as of his father:—

It is very good to get your first impressions of Rome, and I can sympathize with you very fully. I feel that I myself should be horribly affected there by the historical picturesque. I should be extremely sensitive to it objectively, and would therefore all the more revolt from it subjectively, as hearing underneath it all the pent-up moaning and groaning soul of the race, struggling to be free or to come to consciousness. I am glad on the whole that my lot is cast in a land where life doesn't wait on death, and where consequently no natural but only an artificial picturesque is possible. The historical consciousness rules to such a distorted excess in Europe that I have always been restless there, and ended by pining for the land of the future exclusively. Condemned to remain there I should stifle in a jiffy.

The failure of art consists in being spiritually sterile—a mere reiteration of nature and echo of worldliness: "It is melancholy to see the crawling thing which society christens art, and feeds into fawning sycophancy. It has no other conception of art than as polished labor, labor stripped of its jacket and apron, and put into parlor costume. The artist is merely the aboriginal ditcher refined into the painter, poet, or sculptor. Art is not the gush of God's life into every form of spontaneous speech and act; it is the talent of successfully imitating nature—the trick of a good eye, a good ear, or a good hand. It is not a really infinite life, consubstantiate with the subject and lifting him into ever new and unpremeditated powers and achievements; it is an accomplishment, a grace to be learned, and to be put off and on at one's convenience. Accordingly society establishes academies of art, gives out rules for its prosecution, and issues diplomas to the artist, by which he may be visibly discriminated from ordinary people. But always on this condition, that he hallow, by every work of his hands, its existing prejudices and traditions; that he devote his perfectly docile genius to the consecration of its morality" [in Moralism and Christianity].

Furthermore, the artist is peculiarly prone to commit the cardinal sin of attaching importance to himself. The following extract is from a letter written by James in 1854 to his niece, Catharine James, who has asked his help in behalf of a friend with literary ambitions:—

I suppose your friend wouldn't thank me for any advice on the general subject of making literature a profession, and accordingly I will keep any I might otherwise have to give, diligently to myself. But I may say to you, once and away, that literary leisure does not seem to me a boon to be highly coveted. The literary class, as a class, are not respected, because they are not respectable. Individuals among them, like Mr. Irving, Miss Sedgwick, Mr. Emerson, and a few others, all of whom could be easily named, adorn the profession by their own honesty and uprightness, but literary people are generally very despicable. Their 'motive power' is intellectual vanity for the most part, and the machinery by which it works is lying, theft, fraud and every species of unmanliness and unwomanliness. If you knew the literary people I know, people of name, moreover, you would sicken at the words. There are two very bad things in this American land of ours, the worship of money and the worship of intellect. Both money and intellect are regarded as good in themselves, and you consequently see the possessor of either eager to display his possessions to the public, and win the public recognition of the fact. But intellect is as essentially subordinate a good as money is. It is good only as a minister and purveyor to right affections, and whenever therefore it puts on airs of independence, and frequents public places, it is as sad and vulgar a sight as to see the kitchen-maid exalted to the parlour, and diffusing the aroma of her culinary presence over the sacred precinct.

In attacking art as it exists, James, like Plato, was thinking of art as it ought to be. A fundamental fault of what the world calls art, and esteems as such, is its divorce from honest conviction. Speaking of Swedenborg, he said [in Substance and Shadow]: "There seems a ludicrous incongruity, for example, between his grim, sincere performances and the enamelled offspring of Mr. Tennyson's muse, or the ground-and-lofty-tumbling of an accomplished literary acrobat like Macaulay. It is evident that he himself never once dreamed of conciliating so dainty a judgment. It would be like tying the mainsail of a man-of-war by a cambric handkerchief. His books are a dry, unimpassioned, unexaggerated exposition of things he daily saw and heard in the world of spirits, and of the spiritual laws which these things illustrate; with scarcely any effort whatever to blink the obvious outrage his experiences offer to sensuous prejudice, or to conciliate any interest in his reader which is not prompted by the latter's own original and unaffected relish of the truth."

The true artist, then, will "give natural body to spiritual conception"; he will work "only to satisfy an inspiration, thus from attraction, and therefore divinely"—his business being "to glorify MAN in nature and in men." But art, even in the higher sense, must always be inadequate: "The poet, painter or musician is not the perfect man, the man of destiny, the man of God, because the perfect man is so pronounced by his life or action rather than by his production. He is not constituted perfect by any work of his hands however meritorious, but simply by the relation of complete unity between his inward spirit and his outward body, or what is better, between his ideas and his actions" [in Lectures and Miscellanies].

Such being James's theory of art and literature, his considered judgments of literary men will naturally turn on the extent to which these are vehicles of truth. Thus Thackeray was ignorant of true religion, but in creating Becky Sharp he builded better than he knew: "His philosophy of man is not up to his instincts. Thus in attempting to paint a very wicked woman, he, much to his own surprise, leaves her free of any hearty condemnation. . . . What is the explanation of this fact, whether Mr. Thackeray be aware of it or not? Why do we justify Becky in our inmost hearts, even while condemning her vicious methods? Because it is entirely transparent throughout the book that her evils have not their source in herself, but only in her externally defective fellowship with others. . . . Her whole life was a struggle to get a position, to become herself, to burst the sepulchral environment in which she was born, and come forth into God's genial and radiant air. You might as well expect a drowning man to respect the tails of your coat, if they come within his reach, as expect so vital a soul as this to rest content in that stifling atmosphere, or forego any chance, however conventionally denounced, of freeing herself from it. . . . No, it is sheer error to pronounce the actions ascribed to Becky in this book, hers. They were not hers. She was the hand that executed them, but the soul that animated or inspired them was the inharmonic society in which she was born and matured."

As between Dickens and Thackeray, James preferred the latter. Dickens's moralism, being trite and shallow, must needs be seasoned with exaggeration: "Dickens has no suspicion of astral depths in man. Life is to him a pure surface, bounded on the north by the head, on the south by the belly, on the east by the heart, on the west by the liver, and whatsoever falls without these palpable limits is double-Dutch and moonshine. . . . When one's whole conception of the mystery and majesty of life is limited to the obvious antagonism of virtue and vice, of the church and the play-house, it is evident that the conception will not carry him a great way, and that the jaded palates of novel-readers will speedily crave a more piquant refection. Hence you find all Dickens's virtue to be necessarily tainted. His virtuous men are like game on the turn, appetising to a sophisticated taste, but revolting to a healthy one" [in the New York Tribune, November 13, 1852].

The following letter to Turgenev turns again on that idea of racial solidarity which must qualify our judgment of the individual. He likes Turgenev because he is radically pessimistic. Since the way to the heights leads through the depths, the sooner one descends to total disillusionment the sooner can one mount again to hope.

Cambridge, June 19, 1874

My dear Sir,—

It seems a pity that you should be ignorant of the immense appreciation your books have in this region, and the unfeigned delight they give to so many good persons. I am not myself a representative reader, but I have some leisure at least, which all your readers have not got, and I may therefore without presumption perhaps, constitute myself your informant on their behalf. My son (Henry James, Jr., now in Europe) lately published a critical sketch of your writings in the North American Review, which I think he sent you a copy of. But this was only an individual token, and what I want to say to you is, that my son's high appreciation of your genius is shared by multitudes of very intelligent people here. . . . Your books came out here some five or six years ago in German and French translations, and became known at once to a few appreciative readers, and in a very brief while made their way to the acquaintance of all the reading world. They have indeed made themselves so widely honoured, that whatever you write is now immediately translated for our periodicals, or for independent publication, and the only matter left for the public to differ about is the pronunciation of your name. And some recent events lead me to hope that even this controversy, though still lively, will not be as protracted, nor as envenomed as that over Homer's birthplace.

I think the verdict of the large circle of admirers you have in this place is, that the novel owns a new power in your hands, a deeper fascination than it ever before exerted. Doubtless in this realm also it is true, vixere fortes ante Agamemnona. Men and women of great and surprising genius have made romance an instrument second only to the drama, as an educative power over the emotions. But it must be said of the greatest of these, that the most they do is, either like Scott to give us stirring pictures of human will aux prises with outward circumstance, and finally victorious over it; or else, like George Sand, Thackeray and George Eliot, to give us an idea of the enervating and palsying effect of social convention upon the conscience, in rendering men sceptical, self-indulgent and immoral. But you as a general thing strike a far deeper chord in the consciousness of your reader. You sink your shaft sheer through the world of outward circumstance, and of social convention, and shew us ourselves in the fixed grasp of fate, so to speak, or struggling vainly to break the bonds of temperament. Superficial critics revolt at this tragic spectacle, and pronounce you cynical. They mistake the profound spirituality of your method, and do not see that what touches the earnest heart of man, and fills it with divinest love and pity for its fellow-man, is infinitely more educative than anything addressed to his frivolous and self-righteous head.

Such, in a measure, is the tribute we pay your sympathetic genius, when we talk of you here in the evening on the piazza of the house, facing the setting sun. One of the young ladies present wonders whether an eye so at one with nature as yours, will ever do for American landscape what you have done for Russia; and her companion, whom I sometimes fancy is worthy to take her place beside some of your own heroines, wonders whether our humanity will ever be so defined as to justify an observer like you coming over to look at us. I can only emphasize their wonder by adding my own. But should you ever cross the ocean, you must not fail to come to Cambridge, and sit with us on the piazza in the evening, while you tell us between the fumes of your pipe what the most exercised and penetrating genius of the old world discerns, either of promise or menace for humanity in the civilization of the new.

Please look kindly on my intrusion, and believe me, my dear Sir, with the greatest esteem and admiration, yours,

HENRY JAMES

Turgenev's reply completes the incident, though it sheds no light save on the writer's modesty:—

Carlsbad, Aug. 10, 1874

My dear Sir,—

Three days ago I sent to J. Osgood, the editor of the North American Review, a letter to your son, Mr. Henry James, Jr., whom I supposed in America; and today I receive your letter which you have addressed to my editor in Riga, Mr. E. Behre. My doctor has ordered me to Carlsbad, which seems to be very good for gouty people; and I have just had a violent attack in Russia, where I passed the last three months.

Your letter is too flattering by far, my dear Sir. I am very happy indeed to find such benevolent readers in America and I am proud of your sympathy; but you place me on a much too high level. Modesty is an awkward thing; people don't believe in its sincerity—and people are generally right: I hope it is not modesty, but an exact appreciation of my own faculties, which tells me that I am not ejusdem farinœ with Dickens, G. Sand or G. Eliot. I am very content to fill a second or even a third place after these truly great writers.

Nevertheless accept my heartfelt thanks for all the good and kind things you say to me in your letter; and let me assure you, that it would make me the greatest pleasure not to "smoke my pipe under your verandah"—I don't use tobacco—but to enjoy a quiet and pleasant conversation with the intelligent men and women of your society. Will this pleasure be ever realized? That I cannot say with certitude. I am rather too old now and too weak in health for undertaking such long journeys—but I still cherish the idea of a visit to your new world, so different from the old one. But all this is yet very uncertain. Believe me, my dear Sir, yours very truly,

IVAN TURGENIEW

Of much more serious importance was James's criticism of Emerson and Carlyle. It is natural to couple these two men together as familiar divinities in the James household. Father and sons must deal with them, and each must settle his account. With the father they end by becoming symbols of partial truths, transcended in that completer truth of which he felt himself a vehicle. This completer truth was already outlined in his mind when he met them, and served as a standard by which they were judged: "Before I knew Emerson my intellect had been fully aroused to discern the great mystery of the spiritual creation, or the truth of incarnate Deity, and I never felt disposed, accordingly, to look upon Emerson in any other light than as a feeble, tentative first-fruits of a spiritual Divine resurrection in our nature which would one day be universal." In other words, James regarded Emerson as a spiritual manifestation, and not as a source of ideas. Even as an imitation of perfection, he could not satisfy James because of what the latter thought to be a personal incompleteness, an absence, namely, of "conscience." Emerson embodied innocence of the prenatal sort, rather than the seasoned blessedness that accrues from conflict and struggle. Having no conviction of sin, he was incapable of repentance, and therefore could not know that supreme joy of being united with God, which is the highest moment of life and the purpose of creation:—

My recently deceased friend Mr. Emerson .. . never felt a movement of the life of conscience from the day of his birth till that of his death. . . . He appeared to be utterly unconscious of himself as either good or evil.... I am satisfied that he never in his life had felt a temptation to bear false-witness against his neighbour, to steal, to commit adultery, or to murder; how then should he have ever experienced what is technically called a conviction of sin? . .. I myself had known all these temptations—in forms, of course, more or less modified—by the time I was fourteen or fifteen years old; so that by the time I had got to be twenty-five or thirty (which was the date of my first acquaintance with Emerson) I was saturated with a sense of spiritual evil—no man ever more so, possibly, since I felt thoroughly self-condemned before God. . . . The only holiness which Emerson recognized, and for which he consistently lived, was innocence. [The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James]

Carlyle, like Emerson, was too little of a philosopher to satisfy James. "He is an artist, a wilful artist, and no reasoner. He has only genius." But he differed from Emerson in being an extravagant manifestation of that very conscience which Emerson lacked. If Emerson was a premature synthesis, Carlyle was a belated antithesis. It was to Carlyle's credit that he recognized evil and pitted the moral will against it, but he never rose to that higher understanding in which their opposition is seen as the necessary condition of a fuller spiritual growth. Like the voice from the gallery that hisses the villain, he lacked an aesthetic sense of the dramatic whole:—

The main intellectual disqualification, then, of Carlyle, in my opinion, was the absoluteness with which he asserted the moral principle in the human bosom, or the finality which his grim imagination lent to the conflict of good and evil in men's experience. He never had the least idea, that I could discover, of the true or intellectually educative nature of this conflict, as being purely ministerial to a new and final evolution of human nature itself into permanent harmony with God's spiritual perfection.... On the contrary, he always expressed himself to the effect that the conflict was absolutely valid in itself; that it constituted its own end, having no other result than to insure to good men the final dominion of evil men, and so array heaven and hell in mere chronic or fossil antagonism. .. . He was mother Eve's own darling cantankerous Thomas, in short, the child of her dreariest, most melancholy old age; and he used to bury his worn, dejected face in her penurious lap, in a way so determined as forever to shut out all sight of God's new and better creation [in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James].

In short, while Emerson was nonmoral, and Carlyle moral, the truth as James himself saw it was supermoral. The quality of Emerson's life was an anticipation of perfection, in its spontaneity and perfect faith. Carlyle, through the bitterness of his moral dualism, adds content but loses form. True blessedness is a higher flight in which the form is recovered and envelops the richer content.

It is clear that James did not conceal his opinions of men and of ideas, and although these opinions were not commonly addressed to his sons, they were overheard and taken to heart. When William wrote from Brazil in 1865, apropos of nothing but the current of his own nostalgic reverie, "I think Father is the wisest of all men whom I know," he meant that he trusted his father's impromptu judgment. It was the same trust which impelled him to write, immediately after his father's death: "It is singular how I'm learning every day now how the thought of his comment on my experiences has hitherto formed an integral part of my daily consciousness, without my having realized it at all. I interrupt myself incessantly now in the old habit of imagining what he will say when I tell him this or that thing I have seen or heard."

This sympathetic responsiveness to his father's habitual utterances accounts for two of William James's most characteristic habits of thought. In the first place, he had a constitutional distaste for orthodoxy. As soon as ideas became established, or were proclaimed with unction and airs of authority, they became repugnant. You could spoil any good thing for him by converting it into an institution. That was the way the elder James felt about Swedenborgianism and Christianity, and the younger about science. Closely associated with this first attitude is a disposition to champion the weak and assail the strong. Look over the list of those whom William James attacked most severely, of those for whom he refused to make allowances, and they will prove to be men with some pride of office—some touch of insolence, smugness, self-importance, or complacency. In short, William, like his father, was sometimes in an "abasing mood."

How far William James shared, or was affected by, his father's judgment upon art will appear more clearly in the sequel. It belongs to the story of his vocation. Suffice it to say that his abandonment of painting for science and philosophy was in his father's favor, since it meant a search for truth and the use of style as a vehicle of ideas. We shall also learn more later of William James's opinions of literature, since these opinions came to clearest expression in his intercourse with his brother. But his attitude to Carlyle and Emerson concerns his relations with his father. These men were his father's friends and contemporaries, and they became known to the son through the medium of his father's highly interpretative and peculiarly personal characterization of them.

What gifts, then, did these fairy godfathers bestow on William James in his youth? Neither gave him his philosophy, both gave him precepts and apt quotations. They both influenced his style in his most impressionable period. He responded to Emerson in his acquiescent or optimistic moods, to Carlyle in his warlike moods. In 1903 he reread Emerson extensively, "volume after volume," in preparation for his Centenary address at Concord. In that address he confirmed his father's opinion that Emerson was a seer rather than a thinker. What, then, did this seer see? For William James, Emersonian truth consisted essentially in the vision of a deeper unity behind multiple appearances. Even the individualism or nonconformism of Emerson, which was "the hottest side of him," was not pluralistic. If he separated one individual from other individuals morally, it was only to unite them all on their cosmic side, as being potentially "mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning." This teaching is allied to James's teaching of the unique preciousness and valid claim of each individual, however obscure or despised; but it is a different teaching, divided by all that separates monism from pluralism. For whatever concessions William James made to monism, and he made many, he never conceded that the world had one meaning, indivisible and authoritatively perfect, of which human individuals are the channels. These reserves, together with the suggestion (again reminiscent of his father) that Emerson did not sound the depths of the religious experience, appear in the following letter to W. C. Brownell, written apropos of the latter's American Prose Masters:—

Cambridge, Sept. 2, 1909

Dear Mr. Brownell,—

I have read your splendid essay (on Emerson) and return it. . . . It seems to me wonderfully true both in its praise and its restrictions, but I think it might gain in places by a little consideration. . . . The word "religion" is very ambiguous, but there is an immense field of what it denotes that lay outside of Emerson's nature, so I agree with your strictures on Woodberry's claim. I agree also entirely in your light estimate of his monistic metaphysics, and his Platonic philosophy in general. He evidently had no capacity whatever for metaphysic argument, but he found that certain transcendentalist and Platonic phrases named beautifully that side of the universe which for his soul (with its golden singing sense that the vulgar immediate is as naught relatively to the high and noble, gleeful and consoling life behind it) was all-important. So he abounded in monistic metaphysical talk which the very next pages belied. I see no great harm in the literary inconsistency. The monistic formulas do express a genuine direction in things, though it be to a great extent only ideal. His dogmatic expression of them never led him to suppress the facts they ignored, so no harm was done. (See, e.g., the last couple of pages of his essay on .) Of course to me they seem simply weak, those Platonic formulas, but there are readers whom they inspire, so let them pass! . . .

Thanking you for the pleasure the essay has given me, I am very truly yours,

WM. JAMES

The heat which he missed in Emerson, William James found in Carlyle. The essays published in 1898 under the title of The Will to Believe were composed in part as early as 1879, and they prove how deeply in his youth their author had drunk of Carlyle. When the moment of solution comes it is often Carlyle that provides the solvent. Especially is this true of the problem of evil, where the solution is found in the "gospel of work, of fact, of veracity." "The only escape," writes James, "is by the practical way. And since I have mentioned the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more, and say it is the way of his teaching. No matter for Carlyle's life, no matter for a great deal of his writing. What was the most important thing he said to us? He said: 'Hang your sensibilities! Stop your sniveling complaints, and your equally sniveling raptures! Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!'"

In adopting this gospel William James specifically and with deep conviction rejected that very solution which was his father's: the transcendence, namely, of moral distinctions in a higher or æsthetic flight of the spirit. The father had reproached Carlyle for grimly accepting the finality of the moral struggle; the son says, with Carlyle, that "it feels like a real fight."