Young William James Thinking

by Paul J Croce

  uity, religion has been the place to reflect on the meaning of worldly exis-

  The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace  137

  tence in connection to forces outside nature. Traditional theologies have

  been most explicit in their commitment to the transcendent. Natu ral theol-

  ogies, with major influence in the nineteenth century, and attention to reli-

  gion as the focus of “ultimate concern” in recent times have deemphasized

  this predominant Western equation of religion with the transcendent; how-

  ever, even these turns toward worldly or immanentist directions, with their

  searches for “[religious] meaning in the familiar,” have involved scrutiniz-

  ing nature and social life for evidence of forces beyond this world. 5 In short,

  for almost all citizens of Western cultures even today, and more so in James’s

  time, the sciences have been the fields to go to for answers about the natu ral

  world, and religion has offered hopes beyond the here and now. In the an-

  cient world, this sharp contrast between nature and supernature was not so

  readily assumed, and their example captured James’s imagination.

  The Cleverness of the Greeks

  James’s avocational observations were a variation on a centuries- old cul-

  tural debate about the wisdom of the ancients versus the need to generate

  distinctly modern insights in each succeeding era. During the Middle Ages

  and the Re nais sance, the ancients became objects of intense admiration, with

  the rediscovery of Greek and Roman thought serving as encouragements for

  humanistic learning and academic pro gress. But by the seventeenth century,

  their authority became increasingly contested, with ancients and moderns

  pitted against each other in the “ battle of the books,” with similar clashes in

  the Enlightenment and in educational debates in James’s own time— and

  variations on this battle have continued into the twenty- first century. James’s

  version of these debates began in more modest ways, without insistence on

  either ancient standards or modern ways to dismiss them; while he was

  studying modern natu ral science, he reflected broadly about ancient as-

  sumptions about nature.6

  Within days of his arrival for study at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific

  School in the fall of 1861, James already showed interest in ancient Greek

  art. He was enjoying his new studies in chemistry, although his guarded

  observation that they were only in ter est ing “so far” gave a clue that he was

  not intent on abandoning his other interests while he studied science. Having

  moved away from the family circle, he was content to be “perfectly in de-

  pen dent of every one.” On a clear but cold Saturday after noon in early Sep-

  tember, he took a step back to his still fervent interest in painting by going

  to the Boston Athenæum, which had been founded in 1807 to promote such

  138  Young William James Thinking

  appreciation of the arts and culture. Only a few months removed from

  training as a painter in William Morris Hunt’s studio in Newport, James

  keenly enjoyed a few large canvases by American landscape painter Wash-

  ington Allston, and he delighted in the Athenæum’s “casts from antique

  sculptures.” Trained in the paint er’s craft but with little formal schooling

  in ancient history, he adopted much of the enthusiasm for ancient language

  and culture promoted at the Athenæum and other con temporary educa-

  tional institutions. Just as these admirers of Greek culture would advocate,

  James would make occasional references to Greek my thol ogy, he made a

  lifelong effort to learn some of the Greek language, and he had great enthu-

  siasm for Greek art. 7 What intrigued him most was that the ancients sug-

  gested a way to read science and religion that had become marginalized in

  modern times; and yet their perspectives were rooted in the natu ral world

  that he was studying scientifically.

  In his late twenties, when James was increasingly uncertain about which

  science to study, what work he should take up, or even what his own phi-

  losophy and personal commitments would be, his leisurely diversions in the

  ancient world turned into intensely reflective sessions about the world’s

  cosmic orientation. These steps away from work actually took him to the

  heart of the assumptions within his work. After having visited the Greek

  casts on his home turf in Boston, he brought his interests to Germany where

  he had gone to study physiological psy chol ogy in 1867. After just one visit to

  the casts at the Zwinger Museum in the Saxon city of Dresden, he was

  entranced, as he blurted out enthusiastically: “It is useless to deny that

  the Greeks had a certain cleverness. Houp la la!” 8 This initial enchantment

  would develop into a fascinated urgency about potential lessons from the

  ancients.

  After a long winter of steady scientific study, especially in Berlin, during

  which he also felt depressed from lack of direction, James went to Saxony

  in the spring of 1868 to use water- cure baths and continue his studies. While

  shuttling between work and recovery, the lure of other subjects, especially

  among the Greeks, continued in full force. He repeatedly visited the

  Zwinger and was per sis tently fascinated with the Greek casts, here in an

  even larger collection than at the Athenæum. In early April, he recorded in

  his diary that he had been reading both Darwin and the Odyssey. The next

  entries contain many more references to Homer and Greek art than to any

  science, and his comments range from simple observation about story lines

  and technical details to broader comparisons of ancient and modern world-

  The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace  139

  views. The vehicle of ancient art had transported him away from his imme-

  diate scientific work into a surrogate vocation of philosophical evaluation of

  the natu ral world, artistic commentary, and deep reflection on the decline

  of the ancient world. Fully aware that the science he was studying was a

  centerpiece of modern culture, especially for its authoritative statements

  about nature, he was putting the very premises of his education on trial as

  he scrutinized the museum samples of classical creations.9 Without know-

  ing its full extent, James was part of a broad American fascination with the

  ancient world.

  The non- Judaic and non- Christian cultures of the classical Mediterra-

  nean world rivaled the Bible as major sources of lessons and cultural models.

  On the American scene, the found ers of Puritan New England established

  Harvard College in 1636 with classical training of ministers while Mas sa-

  chu setts Bay was still a frontier settlement; even earlier, at Jamestown, George

  Sandys took time from serving as trea surer of the Virginia Com pany to

  translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses, complete with commentaries suggesting

  parallels between the text’s theme about the mutability of all things and the

  colonists’ often desperate efforts to transform the wilderness around the

  James River into more permanent settlements. Many Americans have liked

  to tell the story of Eu ro pean settlement of the New World by making paral-

  lel
s with the Old World when it was new; Virgil’s saga of Aeneas’s travels

  from Greek Troy to the founding of Rome was a favorite reference for

  American writers from Cotton Mather to Phillis Wheatley. Especially for

  the educated elite, who looked to the ancients as models of civilization and

  refinement, ancient Greeks and Romans even provided secular alternatives

  to Chris tian ity. The badge of learning and gentility conferred by knowledge

  of antiquities was particularly significant for the education of the young,

  because it seemed to guarantee formative exposure to timeless beauty and

  truth. During the eigh teenth century, a higher percentage of Americans was

  reading the classics than in any population in world history since ancient

  times; with some boosterist exaggeration, Thomas Jefferson claimed that

  “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.” Sam Houston offers a good

  example: as a teenager in frontier Tennessee, he read the Iliad over and over

  again beginning in 1808, and its glorification of the heroic shaped his flam-

  boyant drive to find his own glory on the Texas frontier. 10

  In the early republic, examples from Rome dominated Americans’ fasci-

  nation with the ancient world. Classical references animated the republi-

  canism central to American nation building, with attention to the cultural

  140  Young William James Thinking

  lessons to be learned from Roman po liti cal history, especially the supreme

  value of public virtue and po liti cal freedom, and their fragility when facing

  the lures of power. Although the Greek language had been taught for gen-

  erations, interest in Greek intensified in the early nineteenth century. Since

  much of Roman high culture was derived from Greek- inspired, or Hellenis-

  tic, influences, the study of Greece had an extra attraction from the sense that

  it could supply the original meaning of the ancient world. Moreover, this al-

  lure expanded from academic attention to the language, its grammar, and the

  great works of Greek lit er a ture, to the study of the totality of ancient Greek

  society and its arts. This shift “from words to worlds,” in the apt phrase of

  Louise Stevenson and Caroline Winterer, was part of what would become

  the liberal arts college curriculum, a form of education James replicated

  with his wide self- study and that he avidly promoted once he became a pro-

  fessor. The educational goal was the formation of young people uplifted

  with culture, in the way the Greeks were thought to be, ideally. Ironically,

  recent scholarship suggests that fifth- century bce (before the Common

  Era) Athens, far from the imagined ideal, was primarily a military state: the

  democracy promoted citizen motivation to defend the city, the higher learn-

  ing supplied ideas of discipline and regularity for military formation, the

  athletics was for training young male warriors, and the excellence in art

  came from extreme competition. Before this currently prevailing view, the

  emphasis on ancient cultural refinement reflected Victorian ideals; imbibing

  the spirit of ancient Greece, students would, in a sense, “become Greek,”

  with their attention now focused on the pursuit of truth and beauty. Classical

  Athens, with its democracy and great works of philosophy, art, and lit er a-

  ture, struck many American educators as models of gracefulness for fostering

  personal character and ultimately for offsetting the grasping materialism of

  the modern world or, more mundanely, for adding a sheen of refinement to

  frontier settlements.11

  During the nineteenth century, Americans were succeeding vigorously

  in enterprise and expansion, but many craved the taste and refinement

  that they perceived Greek culture could supply. Shortly after its founding in

  1847, even Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School came close to adding classi-

  cal philology to its curriculum, before adopting the specialized scientific

  coursework that James would know in the 1860s. Beyond the classrooms of

  the growing colleges, the Greek influence took root across the American

  landscape with the surge of Greek Revival homes and public buildings, de-

  signed with ancient “gracefulness,” in emulation of a style “superior to those

  The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace  141

  of any other nation,” in the admiring words of South Carolina College

  professor Isaac Stuart. And the demeanor of figures in Greek sculpture

  became associated with an elegant and idealized— but ironically white,

  Anglo- Saxon— model of beauty, particularly for women, especially with the

  discovery during the 1870s in the Greek city of Tanagra, north of Athens, of

  small sculpted figures adorning tombs. Thomas Anshutz’s painting The

  Tanagra portrays a refined woman in living repre sen ta tion of the idealized

  sculpted figures. 12

  While the admiration for Rome had been a way of understanding the

  military and po liti cal demands of nation formation, the enthusiasm for

  Greece well suited cultural aspects of nation shaping during the years after

  1815. The perceived simple nobility of the ancient Greeks represented the

  kind of people many Americans wanted to become. Another reason for this

  rise in American philhellenism was sympathy for the Greek War of In de-

  pen dence against the Turks, 1821–30, which stirred reminders not only of

  ancient heroes of Western civilization but also of Americans’ own anticolo-

  nial revolution— with support amplified because the Christian Greeks were

  fighting Islamic Turks. The interests in Greece also received a major push

  from Americans traveling in Eu rope, including James, who was particu-

  larly attracted to the German romantic enthusiasm for ancient Greece

  while in pursuit of German scientific training. 13

  When in Dresden in 1868 James expressed admiration for Johann Winck-

  elmann, who had helped inaugurate the German interest in the Greeks by

  infusing his History of Ancient Art (1764) with glowing accounts of the abso-

  lute excellence of ancient Greek art. The serene natu ral setting, especially

  around Athens, and the passion for po liti cal freedom, he argued, had estab-

  lished a context for Greeks to create works of transcendent beauty. Ger-

  mans with Winckelmann’s style of Graekomanie (literally mania for things

  Greek) maintained that the work of the Greeks should serve as the standard

  for all future art. This zeal for the won ders of ancient brilliance and beauty

  was the setting in which German romanticism was born, with the identifi-

  cation so strong that current scholar Dennis Schmidt even refers to the

  “Germans and other Greeks.” The Greek ideals seemed so out of reach that

  all modern works paled by comparison, but Goethe, Schiller, and other Ger-

  mans hoped to “return to Greek art” not by direct imitation of their excel-

  lence but by striving to achieve in their own settings— similarly freed from

  convention and through honest reckoning with their own inspirations— what

  the Greeks had achieved in theirs. Much of German romanticism emerged

  142  Young William James Thinking

  from this constant striving for absolute ideals that the Greeks represented.

  James noticed this affin
ity, observing about these “old Germans a repose

  wh[ich] is analogous in some mea sure to that of the Greeks.” And yet, even

  though both Greeks and Germans endorsed the importance of “simply be-

  ing,” for the Germans it was “only a small holy corner of . . . their ‘Weltan-

  schauung [worldview]’ ” competing with their scientific work, whereas, by

  contrast, James added in reference to the ancient approaches to nature, “to

  the Greek it expressed every thing.” 14

  Other Americans visiting Germany had already reinforced this enthusi-

  asm for ancient Greece. Edward Everett, earned a Ph.D. from Göttingen in

  1817 and lectured widely about the “glorious world that went before us” with

  capacity to “elevate . . . the spirit.” The American consul in Rome, George

  Washington Greene, echoed Winckelmann in proclaiming that Greek sculp-

  tures embodied the “language” of sculpture with ability to express “ every

  shade of thought.” The Greek ruins in Southern Italy were particularly com-

  pelling sites; these colonies of Greece so rivaled the homeland in cultural

  achievements that they came to be known as Magna Graecia, Greater Greece— a

  compelling historical pre ce dent for Eu ro pean Americans eager for Amer i ca

  to become Magna Europa. Historian George Bancroft, upon visiting the

  Temple of Neptune near Naples, was at a loss for words for its “air of impos-

  ing grandeur”; novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick suggested that viewers

  should “class the sensations” felt there with “ those excited by the most mag-

  nificent works of nature, Niagara and the Alps.” 15

  Of course, for most Americans, such visits were not an option, so muse-

  ums and colleges offered substitutes for these grand tours of Mediterranean

  antiquities by enlarging their collections of ancient artifacts. More Americans

  would then absorb the spirit of the classics, without leaving their native

  land. This approach would be eco nom ical and downright demo cratic, and it

  would still capture the essence of classicism, since the impor tant thing

  about these sites was not the material artifacts themselves but the graceful-

  ness and idealism that the viewer could absorb from them. This pro cess

  replicated the ancient Roman relation to Greece: Greek culture represented