THE ROUTINE OF TEACHING agreed with James, and he began immediately to consider it as a career possibility. There was, however, the annoying question of what to teach. His deepest interest continued to be philosophy, but there was no job teaching philosophy on the horizon. He felt he could wait no longer because he needed to be making a living. He could always apply to Father for money, but taking at least a step toward self-sufficiency was becoming an urgent matter of self-respect. On February 10, 1873, just as he was starting to teach, he wrote in his diary, “I decide today to stick to biology for a profession in case I am not called to a chair of philosophy, rather than to try to make the same amount of money by literary work while carrying on more general or philosophical study. Philosophy I will nevertheless regard as my vocation.”1 Biology was for James a catchall phrase that included, prominently, physiology.
In early April President Eliot inadvertently made James’s dilemma a bit worse by offering him the whole course—that is, physiology plus anatomy—for the following year. But William had now changed his mind, and his impulse was to say no. He wrote Harry that he had told Eliot, “I had resolved to fight it out on the line of mental science,” even though the job he was being offered “might easily grow into a permanent biological appointment, to succeed Wyman, perhaps.”2 On April 9 William changed his mind again, and told Eliot he would take on the anatomy as well as the physiology. In his diary he tried to persuade himself that “philosophical activity as a business is not natural for most men and not for me.” Then, too, there was the problem of concreteness, of James’s already strong empirical streak. “The concrete facts in which a biologist’s responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant mood is on him.” The long diary entry concludes by observing that “the ends of nature are all attained through means; perhaps the soundest way of recovering them is by tracking them through all the means.”3
Throughout his first term of teaching, James went back and forth about not only what to teach but whether to teach at all the following year. The alternative would be to travel, rest up, and concentrate on improving his health. Teaching had raised his spirits, but not, it was now clear, his physical condition. He wrote Harry in May, “I believe I told you in my last that I had determined to stick to psychology or die. I have changed my mind and for the present give myself to biology.” With a little roll of the drums and a cymbal clash of martyrdom he went on: “This is virtually tantamount to my clinging to those subjects [anatomy and physiology] for the next 10 or 12 years if I linger so long.”4
Harry picked up on Willy’s self-pity and wrote back, “There seems something half tragic in the tone with which you speak of having averted yourself from psychology.” Stung by this, perhaps, Willy replied with a blaze of assurance that completely concealed the thrashing indecision in which he labored. He told Harry, “The only thing with me now is my health; my ideas, my plan of study are all straightened out.” Indeed he was feeling better about teaching, and about working somewhere along the continuum from physiology to psychology to philosophy, but his health was, even by mid-July of 1873, still a major problem. “I alternate,” he wrote Harry, “between fits lasting from 4 or 5 days to three weeks of the most extreme languor and depression, weakness of body and head and pain in the back—during which, however I sleep well—and fits of equally uneven duration of great exhilaration of spirits, restlessness, comparative bodily and mental activity—coupled however with wakefulness of the most distressing sort that makes me absolutely sick.”5
By late May he was as yet uncertain about teaching in the coming year. When his classes and the exam were at last over, he went off to Magnolia, Massachusetts, then to the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast, and, in August, to the Catskills. On August 25, at the last possible moment, he wrote Eliot to ask if a substitute could be found to teach in his place. Eliot replied affirmatively on September 2, and William made hurried plans to go abroad.
He had a feeling of urgency, almost of desperation about the trip. “I feel,” he wrote Harry, “that I must get well now or give up. It seems as if I should too—for nothing remains but this g—d——d weakness of nerve now.” “Weakness of nerve” was his medical diagnosis, not a moralizing reproach. He used the same phrase to describe himself in another letter, to brother Bob, also dated September 2, 1873.6
He left on October 11 on the Cunard liner Spain. The weather during the crossing was mostly dismal. He arrived in London and wrote home, on October 25, that he was feeling “awfully blue and homesick.” The weather continued endlessly cold, dark, and rainy. “The awful fullness and solidity of life here in England discourage one.”7 He skipped Boulogne, scene of his boyhood happiness, and sped along to Paris. It rained steadily, day after day. He found Paris, then being reconstructed by Baron Haussmann, “a terribly monotonous looking city.” He told his sister that he had had “a pretty melancholy time” in both London and Paris. After a day or so in the latter, he took a train for Turin and then Florence, where Harry was working and living. It poured rain the entire way. Harry—whom William now referred to almost always as “the angel,” with exactly what tinctures of irony and affection we can only guess—was, said William, “wholly unchanged.” Harry was no balder than when he had left America, and his beard, said William, was very rich and glossy from his using brilliantine on it. “He seems wholly devoted to his literary work and very industrious.” Once again “the angel” was showing Willy the way.
In Florence William still complained of “the seedy spell in which I have been plunged for upwards of a fortnight,” and of a “heavy lethargy,” though he predicted it would soon wear off.8 His first impressions of Florence and, subsequently, Rome were quite as negative as those of London and Paris. None of these places seemed picturesque. He recoiled from the “slimy streets and caverns in which people live,” and he thought the “human race here has a debilitated look, undergrown and malformed.” He could hardly believe this was “the great Italian people whom Taine and Stendhal etc. bully us with.” He spent November in Florence, December in Rome, and January back in Florence. He was, he said, disgusted with “all this dead civilization crowding in upon one’s consciousness.” In Rome he saw the Colosseum Byronically, under a “cold sinister half moon,” and was repelled by a scene so “inhuman and horrible that it felt like a nightmare.” He saw at first in St. Peter’s “so perfectly explosive a monument of human pride, insolence, and presumption... that for a moment I felt fully like Martin Luther.” He explained his strong antipathetic reactions in a letter to Wilky: “One has to grow up to Europe again when he comes, just as if he’d never been here before.” And he did grow up, or at least warm up, again, somewhat, to Rome and then to Florence.9
But real life for William was in America. Wilky was married in November to Caroline Cary, whom everyone called Carrie, and Bob and Mary had a baby boy, Edward, the elder Jameses’ first grandchild. William talked some about working in the Florence lab of a physiologist named Moritz Schiff, but nothing came of it.10 He did begin a journal in Florence, in which he wrote about the picturesque, about his own diminished interest in art, about Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (which he was reading in German), but most interestingly about Emerson. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that an age will come when our present devotion to history, and scrupulous care for what men have done before us... will seem incomprehensible; when acquaintance with books will be no duty, but a pleasure for odd individuals; when Emerson’s philosophy will be in our bones, not our dramatic imaginations.”11
While in Rome, William contracted a mild case of malaria and was advised to go back to Florence. As soon as he recovered, Harry came down with a fever (not malaria), and it was William’s turn to nurse Harry, and Harry’s turn to tell the folks at home that Willy was “a ministering angel, and nursed and tended me throughout with inexpressible devotion.”12 More significant, Harry commented in the same letter on Willy’s overall mental condition. For all his groaning about Europe, “Willy is,” said Harry, “most vigorous and brilliant. He seems entirely the Willy of our younger years again—in looks, spirit, humor and general capacity.” Harry liked to report good news, he habitually put a good face on things, and he was capable of prodigious concealment, but this comment has the ring of truth—it’s the italicized word “entirely”—that seems finally to spell the end of William’s long-troubled twenties and early thirties.
William now described himself as “overflowing with homesickness.” He told a friend he had “little heart for this loafing life.” He told Bob, “My heart is not in the thing here, for I want to be hard at work in Cambridge.” To Alice he wrote, “The weight of the past world here is fatal—one ends by becoming its mere parasite instead of its equivalent.” Harry noted that William was “intensely impatient to get home and return to work.”13
William went to Venice in February, finding the galleries and churches very cold—a situation that has not changed in the 130 years since. He went on to spend ten days in Dresden, then sailed for home from Bremen, reaching New York on March 13, 1874. Back in Cambridge, he was surprised at the “diminished scale of interest” and at how “mean and flimsy” things looked. But he began to feel better physically within a week of his return. He was working regularly in Bowditch’s lab.
In a letter to Bob he gave a thumbnail account of his earlier crisis, and it says a good deal about his spiritual condition—if we may use such a phrase—in 1874. “I worked through it [the crisis] into the faith in free-will and into the final reign of the good conditional on the cooperation of each of us in the sphere—small enough often—in which it is allowed him to be operative. Why God waits on our cooperation is not to be fathomed—but as a fact of experience I believe it—and having that belief open to me I have lost much of my former interest in speculative questions—I have taken up Physiology instead of Philosophy and go along on a much calmer sea with a more even keel.” While the calm, unprotesting reference to God may surprise us, James’s expression of belief is thoughtfully and typically conditional: any triumph of good depends on the cooperation of each of us. The idea that God needs man is not argued for, but simply stated as a fact of personal experience. A specific belief is not a refuge or a rock or a thing to cling to, but a matter of certain possibilities being open to one, and of assent to those possibilities.14
His going along on a more even keel as regards the big issues made it possible for him to open himself to other books and ideas. When he had first read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, he had remarked to Harry, in December 1872, on its “tremenj’us intellectual power” and had called it “the biggest novel ever written.” By February 1873 his opinion had changed almost completely. He thought it a “blasted artistic failure.” He liked the Lydgate-Rosamund story, calling it a “pure artistic study,” but he thought “Ladislaw-Dorothea suggest[ed] too much and solve[d] too little.” Now, in March 1874, just home from Europe, William revised his revised opinion, saying the book was “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written.” Consistency, for James, was not in itself a virtue. Vacillation was now a fixed habit. He was so open to almost any kind of experience that he was apt to change his mind repeatedly about any single piece of it, from a career plan to a recent book.15
He was now, again, interested in “investigating” spiritualism (those are his ironic quotes). He told Catherine Havens, a frequent correspondent, “I went a few days ago to see a medium who was said to raise a piano in broad daylight.” James might indeed be open to the possibility, but he was no fool. “She was a deceiver,” he went on, “performing the feat by means of her wonderfully strong and skilful knee.” He thought he was bound to make an important discovery if he kept on with spiritual investigation. He would find either that “there exists a force of some sort not dreamed of in our philosophy” or that the voluminous testimony thereof really constitutes “a revelation of universal human imbecility.” He was open to either conclusion, but it was a principled openness, not gullible, not indifferent, not fuzzy-minded, and certainly not overeager to see mysterious forces lurking under every piano. He might not have it yet, but he was sure there would actually be a conclusion when all the evidence was in.16