MINNIE TEMPLE paid two visits to the Jameses in Cambridge in November 1869. One visit was before November 7, the other was from the twelfth to the nineteenth.1 In the middle of Minnie’s second visit, William wrote a long letter to his brother Bob, who had just become engaged to marry his first cousin Catharine Barber Van Buren.2 William was aghast; he told Bob about the problems associated with “consanguineous marriages,” dwelt on the awful “risk of generating unhealthy offspring,” and declared that he himself was “fully determined never to marry with anyone” for fear of transmitting his own “dorsal trouble” to the next generation. Minnie reported on cousinly relations in a much brighter tone in a letter to her sister: “I have just returned from a visit to Cambridge of a week. I had a delightful time... Mr. Holmes was as nice as ever, Willy James, nicer than ever.”3
Something happened, during this second visit, between William and Minnie. Two days after her happy report to her sister, Minnie wrote to John Gray, telling him, with notable emphasis, that she had enjoyed her visit to the Jameses “far more than I expected.” She spoke of “the settling down and shaking up—the dissipating of certain impressions that I had thought fixed, and the strengthening of others I had not been so sure of etc etc. An epoch in short... in which a great deal of living was done in a short time.” Nine days later she wrote Gray again: “In my next I will tell you a proposal that has been made to me, not of matrimony, but better.”4 Five days after this, William wrote Harry with his long account of changing his mind about Minnie, about how delightful she was “in all respects,” and going as far as to comment, without irony, on her courage having a certain religious side to it.
Minnie Temple and William James did not fall in love this November. It was something more than that, and something less, and it was terribly complicated. She had been strongly, newly attracted to him for almost a year. He had been involved with other things and people, but in November when she visited William and his family twice, the two seem to have recognized and acknowledged a more than cousinly kinship, a profound bond with a solid religious basis. The scraps of Minnie’s letters to William that survive have a seriousness of tone and an intimacy that are unique is his correspondence up to now.
And yet marriage was out of the question. As we have seen, William had strong feelings about first-cousin marriage; Minnie was desperately ill, and William believed that he was far too unhealthy to think of marriage, let alone children. But they were in some ways similar spirits, restless, yearning, hungry for life, ambitious, scornful of second best, sensitive, ironic, and outgoing, and there now arose between them a strange attraction, a cousinship of the spirit, the sort of thing Lyndall Gordon calls, in another context, an “uncategorized ferment of inward possibilities.”5 They were suddenly able to understand each other, drawn simultaneously to each other’s avidity for life, each other’s stoic, ironic acceptance, and each other’s sad, tragic side. Minnie Temple was the first woman William had ever been able to accept as a complete equal, and the first person he could talk with about his deepest religious and spiritual concerns. They came, during November and December, to a difficult, exalted, doomed intimacy, deadly serious at times and too intense to maintain or to be good for Minnie, whose health was, of course, much the worse of the two.
Whatever the new understanding with Minnie really was, whatever the proposal that was better than matrimony (spiritual partnership? soul-mating? some Werther-like love in death?), it only increased William’s unhappiness. In the same letter to Harry in which he praised Minnie, he also praised some “extracts from a Persian poet” that Charles Eliot Norton had sent to the North American Review. These extracts were from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Norton was reviewing Edward FitzGerald’s translation; his long, old-fashioned piece comprises mostly excerpts and is essentially a first American edition, reprinting as it does seventy-six of the quatrains and giving a fair representation of the work as a whole. William found the quatrains “mighty things,” and he urged Harry to read them. Minnie read them too.6
Ah Love! Could you and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!
William’s mood darkened. On December 21 he wrote in the diary he reserved for moments of crisis, “I may not study, make or enjoy—but I can will. I can find some real life in the mere respect for other forms of life as they pass, even if I can never embrace them as a whole or incorporate them with myself.” He does not specify the “other forms of life,” but his feelings are of renunciation, and close to despair. “Nature and life,” he went on, “have unfitted me for any affectionate relations with other individuals.” Wrapped in this winter garment of despondency, William wrote Harry on December 27 that “stomach, bowels, brain, temper and spirits are all at a pretty low ebb,” and two days later he told Henry Bowditch that he had “been prey to such disgust for life during the past 3 months as to make letter writing almost an impossibility.”7
On the first of January William posted his study plan for the year ahead. He hoped, gamely, to “finish Father’s works, Schopenhauer, Maudsley, Boismont, Griesinger, Spencer’s Biology, Fechner, and Fichte’s Introduction,” and he tried to steel himself to be content with those modest goals. Then, abruptly, on January 10 or 12, just before or after his twenty-eighth birthday, William suffered a complete “dorsal collapse... carrying with it a moral one.”
Three days later Minnie sent him a letter, part of which he kept for the rest of his life, tucked behind a photograph of her at sixteen. The letter is courageous and sad, it breathes intimacy and renunciation, and it must have recorded for William a close, telling moment. Minnie’s strength and grace can still be felt across 135 years.
The more I live the more I feel that there must be some comfort somewhere for the mass of people, suffering and sad, outside of that which Stoicism gives—a thousand times when I see a poor person in trouble, it almost breaks my heart that I can’t say something to comfort them. It is on the tip of my tongue to say it and I can’t—for I have always felt myself the unutterable sadness and mystery that envelop us all—I shall take some of your Chloral tonight, if I don’t sleep—Don’t let my letter of yesterday make you feel that we are not very near to each other—friends at heart. Altho’ practically being much with you or even writing to you would not be good for me—too much strain on one key will make it snap—and there is an attitude of mind, (not a strength of Intellect by any means) in which we are much alike. Goodbye.
Your Aff. Cousin, Mary Temple
Minnie must have tried to distance herself from William in an effort to save herself from the intensity—the strain—of their being together. It was a renunciation William would have approved and honored even as it left him emptier and more self-despising than ever.8
When, after William’s death, his wife, Alice, read the long, moving section on Minnie Temple that ends Henry James’s Notes of a Son and Brother, she told Henry: “You may not understand in the least how I feel, but it almost seems as if I had had all that she deserved. Were you ever haunted by a ‘vicarious Atonement’ feeling? That some one else was going without that you might be blessed?” There are two mysteries about Minnie’s relationship with William. One is romantic, the other is religious, and Alice’s remark here hints at both.9
On January 19, William wrote Harry to say that Father had a couple of articles in the Atlantic on marriage, and that he, William, had just read The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s romance about a family curse. “I little expected so great a work,” said William. He also noted that he was still suffering from a recent overdose—“which I took for the fun of it”—of chloral; that is, chloral hydrate.10 We have to wonder whether “for the fun of it” covers the case or whether he was edging toward suicide again. Six days after this, Minnie was again writing to John Gray, saying, among other things, “Willy James sometimes tells me to behave like a man and a gentleman, if I wish to outwit fate. What a real person he is. He is to me, in nearly all respects, head and shoulders above other people.”11
Minnie was now very thin, terribly weak, and no longer able to sleep. Her fate seemed to make nonsense of William’s belief that people can control their lives, and he collapsed in on himself in yet another crisis, writing in his diary for February 1, 1870, “Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard... or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?” By “moral business” William meant the view that, after all, we are able to will and to choose our path in life, that we are not powerless pawns in an all-determined universe. It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.
A good part of William’s problem was due, he now saw, to his having accepted the view that we are powerless in the hands of fate. He now vowed, however, to give the moral business—the idea that we can choose—a serious, steady, and unconditional trial, rather than using it piecemeal, “to patch out the gaps which fate left in my other kinds of activity.”12 Perhaps he was moved—who wouldn’t have been?—by Minnie’s refusal to quit. On February 10 she wrote another extraordinary letter to William. It is twelve pages long, and only parts of it survive. In a tone wholly new and unprecedented in James’s correspondence, Minnie gives him a solemn and moving account of her recent struggles with religious belief. The letter is clearly a continuation on paper of an earlier discussion.
She had been, all along, unable to really believe in Christianity—except in the Channing-Unitarian version, which talks about Jesus as an example of human perfectibility. Her uncle Henry had tried to get her to see how there might be real truth in the idea of atonement, “a mysterious intervention of God to save us and make us happy by the vicarious suffering of Christ, once for all.” As Minnie told it, she had been so tired physically and mentally, so in need of rest, that she at last accepted this idea. But only briefly. By February 10 she had renounced it, telling Willy, “I am after all, a good deal of a pagan.” With her clear-eyed candor, Minnie refused orthodox Christianity and declared instead what she was able to believe: “If I had lived before Christ, Music would have come like a divine voice to tell me to be true to my whole nature—to stick to my key-note, and have faith that my life would... in some way or other, if faithfully lived, swell the entire harmony—this is a grander music than the music of the spheres. Of course the question will always remain, what is one’s true life,—and we must each try and solve it for ourselves. I confess that I am”—the rest of the letter is missing.13
Minnie Temple died twenty-six days after writing this. William recorded the event in a way he recorded no other. On a page of his diary all by itself he drew a crude grave marker with the initials M.T. and the date of her death.
Part of William James died with Minnie Temple. The part that remained learned to accept. Thirteen days later, on March 22, William tried to answer Minnie’s last question, What is one’s true life? “By that big part of me that’s in the tomb with you,” he wrote, “may I realize and believe in the immediacy of death.” He had been sunk in and preoccupied with his own troubles, but Minnie alone of his contemporaries had broken through his self-involvement, and now it was Minnie who was dead. Startled by guilt, but moved too by Minnie’s finer spirit, he tried not just to mutter self-indulgently about suicide but to take Minnie’s road, as he tried to declare, as fully as he could, what that way really meant. “Minnie, your death makes me feel the nothingness of all our egotistical fury. The inevitable re-lease is sure: wherefore take our turn kindly, whatever it contains. Ascend to some sort of partnership with fate, and since tragedy is at the heart of us, go to meet it, work it to our ends, instead of dodging it all our days, and being run down by it at last. Use your death (or your life, it’s all one meaning) tat tvam asi”14
That last phrase is from the Chandogya Upanishad. It literally means “that you are,” and it comes from a passage in which a father is trying to instruct his son about the nature of the ultimate reality of the universe and his son’s inescapable place in it. After showing that everything has its root in Being, the father declares that Being is the soul of the world and that the son, as part of that world, has himself a share in that Being. Tat tvam asi asserts that “you are that [ultimate] Being.” The principle of God is common to both the universe and the individual. William James’s use of this phrase at this time can only mean that he had realized—as by a sudden revelation and not a Christian one—that Minnie’s spirit was the same as, and therefore the key to, the spirit of the whole universe.
It would be thirty-two more years before James could return to deal with this central insight, this revelation, in the mysticism chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience. “This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute,” he wrote in that book, “is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition... ‘That art Thou!’ say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: ‘Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that Absolute Spirit of the World.’”15
However it was, at last, between them, Minnie’s death left William James stunned, as though he had been struck by lightning, or by revelation. Minnie’s engagement with religion made religion real for him for the first time. The closing days of Minnie Temple’s life mark the first time in James’s life that he was able to accept the active religious struggle of another person as a valid religious experience. What Minnie felt and said as her death swung nearer was not theoretical or theological or historical or ecclesiastical; it was not a collapse or a concession. It was not one of Father’s “ideas.” Minnie’s death, as Henry James was to say many years later, marked the end, for him and for William, of youth. But it was the end of more than youth for William. It was the wreck of the romantic intensities and intimacies and soul sharing that early love sometimes comes wrapped in. It was also his first glimpse of something else, a view of life as larger than our individual lives. What he could not have foreseen was that worse trouble was just around the corner.