The Letters of William James, Vol. 2. William JamesЧитать онлайн книгу.
it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from the analytic study of Æsthetics—harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personal je ne sçais quaw left out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition—it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind—yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give.
Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments.
Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe." Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny title. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a single one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall greedily read what you write.
I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your "Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of psychology and morals, but which—I tremble to say it before you—on the whole does disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study it.
Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,
To Henry Rutgers Marshall
Dear Marshall,—Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.
I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit interpreting the savage soul to us, as he could, instead of using such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child," which leaves the whole insides out.
Heigh ho!
I have only had time to glance at the first ½ of your paper on Miller. I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an ignoratio elenchi, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.
Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,
To Mrs. Henry Whitman
Dear Mrs. Whitman,—I got your penciled letter the day before leaving. The R.R. train seems to be a great stimulus to the acts of the higher epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you—a fact for which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house, with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive, and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative form of government possible to France in this century could have stood the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it.
Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.23 I didn't know him to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise—and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract. I haven't yet read the first and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a word of gratulation to the author for it.
As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.—You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself. Ever your
When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the "trail" he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a house where he could get food and a conveyance.
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