James was thirty-six years old when he married, forty-eight years old when his first important work, The Principles of Psychology, was completed. For all his energy and genius, there was a sort of hanging back about him, a failure of decision beginning from those first early days of anxiety about his career. He seems to have been capable of any amount of activity, but his ambition was not of the greediest sort. Inspiration and verve made it fairly easy for him to accomplish what he wished, but it was probably procrastination, in all its joy and sorrow, that made him such a great writer on the quirks of human nature. He was a sort of poet of “habit” and “will” and never able to bring himself under their pure, efficient control. A recurring hesitation to commit himself was at the very heart of his philosophical and personal nature. Santayana believed James would have been uncomfortable in the face of any decided question. “He would still have hoped that something might turn up on the other side, and that just as the scientific hangman was about to dispatch the poor convicted prisoner, an unexpected witness would ride up in hot haste, and prove him innocent.” This everlasting question mark is part of James’s appeal for the contemporary mind. He dreaded Germanic system-making, he feared losing touch with the personal, the subjective, the feelings of real human beings more than he feared being logically or systematically faulty. Everyone complained of the looseness of his thought. Chapman: “His mind is never quite in focus.” Ralph Barton Perry speaks of James’s “temperamental repugnance to the processes of exact thought.” And everyone realized that it was the same openness that saved James from pedantry and egotism.
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Religion: sometimes an embarrassment to James’s reasonable admirers. His nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead—all are greeted by James with the purest, melting latitudinarianism, a nearly disreputable amiability, a broadness of tolerance and fascination like that of a priest at a jam session. James’s pragmatism, his pluralism, his radical empiricism have been the subject of a large amount of study and comment. Reworking the sod from whence so many crops have come in their season seems profitless for the enjoyment of James’s letters, letters that are nearly always personal, informal, nontechnical, and rather different in this way from, for instance, Santayana’s recently published correspondence in which philosophy keeps cropping up everywhere. Religion, on the other hand, was a sort of addiction for James, and all of his personality is caught up in it, his unique ambivalence, his longing, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, “for a chasm from which might appear a phenomenon without phenomenal antecedents.”
Whenever someone near to him died, James could not restrain a longing for the comforts of immortality. To Charles Eliot Norton, when he was very ill in 1908, James wrote, “I am as convinced as I can be of anything that this experience of ours is only a part of the experience that is, and with which it has something to do; but what or where the other parts are, I cannot guess. It only enables one to say ‘behind the veil, behind the veil!’. . .” When his sister Alice’s death was obviously near, an extraordinary letter to her said, “When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both ‘worlds’ as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.” A memorial address for his old friend, Francis Boott, ends, “Good-by, then, old friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure, the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and that ancient human loves will never lose their own.”
Immortality was a great temptation and so, also, was the tranquility James had observed to be at least sometimes a result of religious belief. “The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace . . . This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious as distinguished from moral practice.” James had at hand any amount of sympathy for the believer, along with the most sophisticated knowledge of the way in which the religious experience could be treated as a neurotic symptom by the nonbeliever. At the beginning of The Varieties he writes, “A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticizing religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. . . . Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.”
Some of the enchantment of The Varieties comes from its being a kind of race with James running on both teams—here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm. He can call St. Theresa a “shrew,” and say that the “bustle” of her style proves it, and yet he can appreciate the appeal the Roman Catholic Church will often have for people of an intellectual and artistic nature. And beyond conventional religion, beyond God and immortality and belief, there is the “subliminal door,” that hospitable opening through which he admits his living items of “psychical research.” True his passion was instructive, scholarly and perhaps psychological in many cases, but that does not explain the stirring appeal for him in the very vulgarity of the cults, the dinginess of the séances. The Boston medium Mrs. Piper sometimes bored him; even his colleague Myers, a much more devoted psychical researcher, called this lady, “that insipid Prophetess, that tiresome channel of communication between the human and the divine.” But in the end, James finally said about Mrs. Piper: “In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.” Even as late as 1893 James had eighteen sessions with a “mind-curer” and found his sleep wonderfully restored. He says, by way of testimonial to her remarkable powers, “I would like to get this woman into a lunatic asylum for two months, and have every case of chronic delusional insanity in the house tried by her.”
In 1884, the American chapter of the Society for Psychical Research was founded. James became a member and was still a member at the time of his death. Working in psychic research was not just a bit of occasional dashing about to séances and mind readings. The whole movement was filled with bickering intensity, with all the nervous, absorbing factional struggles “minority” beliefs and practices usually develop. An endless amount of work went into this research: the communications from beyond tended to be lengthy. In 1908, James wrote Flournoy, “I have just read Miss Johnson’s report on the S.P.R. Proceedings, and a good bit of the proofs of Piddington’s on cross-correspondence between Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Mrs. Holland, which is to appear in the next number. You will be much interested, if you can gather the philosophical energy to go through with such an amount of tiresome detail. It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in the history of automatism; and Piddington’s and Johnson’s ability is of the highest order.” On his defense of faith healers when they were being attacked as charlatans by the medical profession, James wrote a friend, “If you think I enjoy this sort of thing you are mistaken.”
James’s son, Henry, the first editor of his letters, believed that it was only in the interest of pure research that his father gave so much time to these psychic manifestations and “not because he was in the least impressed by the lucubrations of the kind of mind” that provided such material. Ralph Barton Perry attributes the time spent to James’s psychological interest in unusual cases and also to his natural liberal tendency to prefer the lowly—spiritualism, faith healing, and the like—rather than the orthodox and accepted. The picturesqueness, the dishonesty even, seems to have given James the sort of delight that amounted almost t
o credulity. He would be fatigued and morally discouraged with such people as the Neapolitan medium, Eusapia Palladino, about whom he said, “Everyone agrees that she cheats in the most barefaced manner whenever she gets an opportunity,” and yet he concludes optimistically that “her credit has steadily risen.” He reports that in England the two daughters of a clergyman named Creery whose feats of thought-transference had much impressed certain strict investigators were later found to be signaling each other. There were many disheartening moments and infidelities. James and his fellow researcher, Hodgson, went on a trip and spent “the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anaemic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds! Give me a full-blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D.—when shall I look upon her like again?” In the letters of a few weeks previously he had described the medium, dear old D., as a “type for Alexander Dumas, obese, wicked, jolly, intellectual, with no end of go and animal spirits . . . that woman is one with whom one would fall wildly in love, if in love at all—she is such a fat, fat old villain.” You do not find the delight, the hospitality, the enjoyment in the other psychic researchers—only credulity and reports and statistics on “controls,” those spirits who give off conversation and information to the strange vessels capable of hearing them. One control accused the psychologist Stanley Hall of having murdered his wife.
James seems to have enjoyed all this as another learned man might enjoy burlesque, but at the same time he took it with a great deal of seriousness. His yea is followed by his nay, as is usual with him, and yet he hoped that these manifestations would be scientifically validated, that the endless, wearisome, fantastic proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research would be an important contribution to knowledge. In all this James is a sort of Californian; he loves the new and unhistorical and cannot resist the shadiest of claims. He, himself, and most of the people who write piously about him felt that he died without saying all he might have said, without finishing his system, without in some grand conclusion becoming the great philosophical thinker that he was, or at least without in the end truly and thoroughly writing his final thoughts on the universe and life. Perhaps there is a sense in which this may have been the case, but perhaps it is only the usual scholarly appetite for the weighty and lengthy. William James without his gaiety, his spooks, his nuts and frauds, his credulity and his incongruous longings for something more than life, even though he was committed to testing every belief by life, would not be the captivating and splendid spirit he is. It is usual to remember his wit, his courtesy, his geniality, his liberalism, but in the end his image is indefinable and one does not know how to name the quality that shines in every bit of his writing, in all we know about him, in the character and spirit we believe him to have been. Perhaps it is his responsiveness, his unexpected sympathies, even his gullibility. Or his goodness. Whatever it may have been, we feel it as something simple many others might have and yet hardly anyone seems to possess. A certain flatness and repetitiveness appear in people’s attempts to define him, for he is odd but not dark, rich not in peculiarities but rather peculiar in the abundance of his endowment with the qualities and dispositions we admire in all men.
About his letters the same ideas come to mind—were we better, more gifted, more abounding in our feelings we might have written them ourselves. James’s correspondence is spontaneous and casual. Letters are not necessarily of that order; every sort of letter, the formal, the affected, the merest scribble or a showpiece composed with all the deliberation of a sonnet, all these have been at some time written wonderfully by someone. Yet a special regard is given to the impulsive, free letter because such unrevised and personal moments have an authenticity utterly innocent of posthumous longings. They are the nearest things we have to the lost conversations of memorable persons. James’s letters are felicitous, easy, genuine as talk, hurriedly written, each for its own occasion, and yet very much written, with all the sense of form and beauty and the natural power to interest that come from a man with a pure gift for the art of letter writing. They are intimate and personal; they have a romantic fullness of emotion; they are the productions of a social creature, a man of the world, at least in the sense of complicated obligations and a conscientious regard for friendships. They have a poetical sweetness; they delight and charm, and they are deeply affecting, even somewhat sad, as they reveal year by year a life and sensibility of great force and great virtue.
It certainly did not occur to William James at the beginning of his career that he was going to be an important writer, that this, rather than painting, was the art he was going to master. Indeed, after his first review he said, “I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this price.” He spoke of “sweating fearfully for three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying, etc.” It was often hard for him to settle down to philosophical and professional writing; yet once started, his marvelous clarity, humor, and his superb prose style carried him along rapidly enough. Letter writing, on the other hand, was a pure pleasure, a duty and an indulgence at the same time. His desire, in letters to friends, was to give happiness—compare this with D. H. Lawrence who seemed when he felt the desire to communicate with his friends to want, at best, to instruct, and, at the worst, to chastise. James’s affections appear to be without limits. “Darling Belle-Mère,” he addresses his mother-in-law and signs off with “oceans of love from your affectionate son.” His colleagues are greeted with “Glorious old Palmer” and “Beloved Royce.” James is, as his letters show, quite susceptible to women; he is their correspondent on suitable occasions with great and convincing gallantry. He has such pleasure in his friends that the reader of his letters longs to know the recipients—a condition far from being the usual one with great letter writers. (Madame de Sévigné’s daughter is one of the last persons we would want to recall from the shades.) Grace Norton, Fannie Morse, Thomas Ward, Henry Bowditch, and Mrs. Whitman seem persons of the most pleasing dimensions as we meet them in James’s correspondence. His attitude toward them all is benevolent, loving, loyal, and completely without pompousness or self-importance. James was almost curiously modest. People crowded to his lectures, he was truly a public figure, and an international celebrity, too, but there is never anything of rigidity or conceit in his character. He hardly seemed to believe he had done anything unusual. His tenderness, too, was of the most luxuriant variety and stayed with him forever. John Jay Chapman thought he always liked everything and everyone too well.
1960
LIVING IN ITALY
Reflections on Bernard Berenson
IN THE rather meek, official narration of the life of Mrs. Jack Gardner, I came across an arresting photograph of Bernard Berenson as a young man, a student at Harvard. Here among the illustrations relating to the subject of the biography (Mr. and Mrs. Gardner with Mr. and Mrs. Zorn in Venice; the Gothic Room at the Gardner Museum, etc.), among the details of ancestry, the accounts of endless journeys and evening parties, of purchases and decisions, courageous endurance and interesting self-indulgence, the passionate, young face of Berenson gazed out serenely, a dreaming animal caught in the dense jungle growth of a rich, lively woman’s caprice and accomplishment. This early photograph is a profile, as fine and pleasing as a young girl’s; the hair, worn long, curls lightly, falling into layers of waves; there is a perfect, young man’s nose, a pure, musing, brown-lashed eye, fortunate long, strong bones of chin and jaw. The collar of the young man’s jacket is braided with silk and he looks like an Italian prodigy of the violin, romantically, ideally seen, finely designed, a gifted soul, already suitable to court circles.
We spent the winter of 1950 in Florence and used to go out to see Berenson, as so many had gone before and would go afterward. This unusual man was marvelously vivacious and, in more than one respect, actually inspiring; and yet I would always leave him, somewhat troubled, ungratefully adding and subtracting, unable to come
to a decision about him or his life. He was not what I had expected, but I despaired of having an original, fresh or even an honest opinion about him. He was too old, had been viewed and consulted far too much; you had a belated feeling you were seeing the matinée of a play that had been running for eight decades. And even the guests staying at his house approached him with caution, fearing to be taken in by an ancient “tourist attraction.” Sometimes one of Berenson’s guests would take the night off and come to our apartment in Florence where we would drink too much or talk too much and the guest would return to his host, much too late, defiantly clanging the bell to have the gates of the villa opened. When I thought about Berenson, his young profile of sixty-five years before would come back to my memory, mistily mixing the lost image with the reality of his famous, white-haired, aged elegance, his spare and poetical look, his assurance and his suppressed turbulence. His turbulence and disorderly emotions were not suppressed, I believed, for psychic hygiene so much as for reasons of practicality. In Berenson’s beauty there was the refinement, the discipline, the masculinity of a little jockey and some of that profession’s mixture of a fiercely driving temperament with the capacity for enjoying a judicious repose. He understood that the proud, small person, believing in art and comfort, must have singular powers and unrelenting watchfulness. Indulgence feminizes; perfection and beauty, without restraint, provoke the unconscious, fatten and soften the will.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 12