WITH THE FIRST SET of lectures behind him and the second set still a year off, James’s spirits and his overall condition improved. He felt stronger and tougher. He wrote to Godkin, “I have got a new tone.” He longed for home, for the American scene, but he stayed abroad, partly to take one more “cure” at Nauheim but mostly because he and Alice had rented out both the Cambridge house and the Chocorua summer place through August. Certainly money was not a problem. He had made $10,000 on his books in the past two years. That is the equivalent of two years’ full salary, or about $200,000 in today’s dollars, so he could, at least for the present, teach or not teach, as he wished.1 He was so eager to be home that he began counting the days and hours. On the last day of August 1901 he wrote a friend that in forty-five minutes the family would be rolling toward Euston Station for a noon train and by five they would be at sea. He arrived in Boston with Alice, son Harry, and Peggy three days after McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz.
He was sharply conscious of having stayed abroad too long; it had been two years and two months, and now America seemed “half-foreign” to him. The New Hampshire countryside looked pathetic and poverty-stricken after the glories of England and Europe. A veil of strangeness hung over everything, a feeling, he told Pauline Goldmark, he had dreaded from previous experience of it.2
But this return was not a repeat of earlier returns in all respects. There is a different cast to James’s letters, a pulling away, a sort of disengagement—though with mixed feelings. Brother Bob, who had discovered Catholicism, wrote this fall about “the mixture of active despair and a frivolous spirit” with which he faced his troubles. William experienced a different mix, but the strange, sapping contradictoriness of Bob’s outlook was something William shared. Though he felt able again to look to the future with “hopeful eyes and aggressive aims,” he was also writing to Pauline Goldmark with the floppy wistfulness of an old man. “What have you read? What have you cared for? Be indulgent to me, and write to me here [Silver Lake, New Hampshire]...I find letters a great thing to keep me from slipping out of life.”3
But he was not slipping away; if anything, he was slipping back into American life. He resumed a light, nominally half-time teaching load at Harvard, giving just one lecture a week, on Tuesdays, in a course called The Psychological Elements of Religious Life, until he was sure of his health. Even his feelings about Harvard were mixed. He had written Münsterberg, who was busy getting a whole building built just for philosophy, “I am not sure that I shouldn’t be personally a little ashamed of a philosophy Hall,” but he promised not to say so in public. Then, when Münsterberg wrote happily that Harvard had given him an A.M. degree (Harvard’s M.A.), James wrote back genially that Münsterberg was now Harvard “family,” but added, in his new, slightly querulous tone, “I am still an outsider, having no Harvard degree except an M.D., and I have always felt the exclusion.” There is a little self-pity here, no doubt, but also a light wind of disengagement. It appeared in other prof essional matters. Asked to join the new American Philosophical Society, James responded that he could foresee little good from such a thing. “Count me out!”4
Whatever his feelings about Harvard, philosophy, and America, James’s attachment to family and work saw him through the rough return. What he called “the house of James” seemed mostly to be flourishing. Young Henry was entering law school; he had greatly impressed his father on the recent trip to England. “He has the most beautiful poise and balance of character, and is withal so shrewd and humorous, and getting to be a talker, and stored with facts.” Billy was starting his second year at Harvard; he was taller and heavier than his father, rowed against Yale, and took courses from men who remembered his father’s student days. Nathaniel Shaler wrote James, “I see your boy William in my newly started class in Geology 14. Curiously enough there is your look of near forty years ago in his eyes.” Peggy—Margaret Mary—who had become quite a favorite with Uncle Henry during her two years in England, seemed to have bloomed on her return. James wrote with evident pleasure about her to Katharine Rodgers, “Peggy has improved amazingly since her return;—blossomed into a lively hard-working, self-reliant character.” Francis, now called Aleck, was at Brown and Nichols School in Cambridge; he managed the baseball team, and a friend of Aleck’s remembered seeing William James sitting by himself in the stands in raw weather, watching his son’s team and taking a lively interest in the new idea of sliding into base headfirst. Eddie Grant, later of the New York Giants, was teaching the boys the latest moves in baseball.
There was some trouble in the family. Alice suffered from frequent, severe, and protracted migraines at this time. They seemed to intensify just as she was leaving Europe to return home. “Alice is tired with many adjustments, and looks older,” William wrote his brother Henry. Bob’s troubles continued; he was in and out of sanatoriums. Old Edmund Tweedy died; another link with the past was gone. The time abroad had dishabituated James to America, but it also had brought a warmer and more dependable closeness between William and Henry.
Henry’s hospitality had been unstinting—extravagant, really. He had taken to Henry III (who was temperamentally much like his uncle) as well as to Margaret Mary, and he and Alice seemed to understand each other effortlessly. With unfailing and elaborate sympathy Henry stood behind William and wrote soothing and supportive letters. If there was rivalry still, it was over who could be more solicitous. “I thoroughly believe, dear William, that you will work in, work back, work up, if you make it a life-and-death question to give up everything but your own needs for it.” Henry’s steadiness seems to have helped stabilize William, who wrote his brother this autumn to say that the American landscape had reemerged for him, and the “old sense of immediate contact with it has come back. The woods are re-asserting their empire everywhere. Old stone walls in the midst of them marking the boundaries of ancient fields, and old cellars surprising you, showing where ancient farm houses and their barns once stood.” There was a little more nostalgia, a little more looking backward in William’s new tone.5
As he started the fall semester in 1901, his nerves went, as he told Mary Calkins, “to smash” (it had been sister Alice’s term), “absolute nerve prostration!” But he kept working, and his condition, always too closely watched by himself, soon improved. By the end of December William had completed two thirds of the lectures he was to give during his second Gifford stretch. The first five were on saintliness and the value of saintliness. “Saintliness” is an ill-chosen, off-putting word for many people, and the position of these lectures deep in the Varieties, which is already filled with attractive (and now of course famous) subjects—the religion of healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, conversion, and mysticism—means that the chapters on saintliness are apt to get less attention than the others. But it should be remembered that the five saintliness lectures constitute a full quarter of the entire two-year project, and that what James means by saintliness is how religious experience affects practical everyday life.
From the point of view of James the pragmatist, then, these chapters are the clincher; the whole venture stands or falls here, where James proposes that we judge religious experiences by their fruits, by their value for living. This is, in the old language of Calvinism, the question of sanctification, saintliness, the idea that if you were indeed saved, you would thereby be enabled to lead a good life here and now. It is one more idea James found he shared with Jonathan Edwards. “Old fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.”6
James dives in by declaring simply that “the best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show.” Put in personal, psychological terms, “the man who lives in his religious center of personal energy, and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasm differs from his previous carnal self in perfectly definite ways.” The saintly character, then, is “the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual center of the personal energy,” and such a person seems to James to possess, on the whole, four fundamental inner conditions. First is “a feeling of being in a wider life than this world’s selfish little interests.” Second is “a sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.” Third is “an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining self-hood melt down.” Fourth is “a shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections,” a shifting toward the yes! yes! of emotional impulses and away from the no! no! of our inhibitions.7
These inner conditions, taken together, have, says James, “characteristic practical consequences,” which are asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity. With this rough scheme—just an armature, really, not an argument but something to hold up an argument—James proceeds to flesh it out with examples. His first example of the practical effect of a feeling of the presence of a higher and friendly power is from Henry Thoreau, who recorded the following experience in Walden:
Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.8
James’s final example of the practical effects of strong religious feeling is voluntary poverty, a subject that strongly interested him and to which he would return. Voluntary poverty is for James the subject of subjects, the final proof, capping five lectures of proof’s, of the reality of religious feeling. “Felt at all times and under all creeds as one adornment of a saintly life,” voluntary poverty marks the age-old difference between those who have and those who are. In one of his few references to Marxism, James observes “the loathing of ‘capital’ with which our laboring classes today are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having.” James lingers over the idea and over its details. “Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being,” he writes, and he quotes with approval—and with the possession-burdened man’s envy—the Jesuit lay brother (later canonized as Saint Alphonsus) Rodriguez saying, “In our rooms there must be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a candlestick, things purely necessary and nothing more.”
We can think of James himself, retreating from his lavish book-lined four-couch downstairs study to his bare fifty-foot-long empty attic to write this. Voluntary poverty is one of the central hot spots in William James. Nowhere else in all his writing does he permit himself to speak, in his own voice and repeatedly, about the mysteries at the heart of religious life. “Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries,” he writes. “There is the mystery of veracity: ‘naked came I into the world,’ etc.—whoever first said that, possessed this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his creatures.” Noting that this last notion has been more widespread in Muslim countries than in Christian lands, he enlarges on its importance: “Those who have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring... to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in practice. It is humanity, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not share.”9
Nothing in William James’s life that we know about prepares us for this emphasis on voluntary poverty. Yet his language, his insistence on that word “mystery,” convinces us that we are seeing as far into the real man as we ever can. His undisguisable admiration for the inner strength and self-command of the person who voluntarily accepts poverty brings him back to the subject again at the very end of the five-lecture unit on the value of saintliness, where he makes a startling proposal: “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible... May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life,’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?”10
James is not optimistic. “We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant,” he says. This loss has not served us well. “It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” James is equally clear about the benefits of voluntary poverty, and this is another place where he has more in common with Thoreau than at first appears. “There are thousands of conjunctures,” says James, “in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.”11
Perhaps we should have seen this coming, especially if we look back and recall James’s enthusiasm for the blessed austerities of the rustic Putnam Camp and his passion for the outdoor life of the Adirondack high country. He writes of those experiences over and over. And his life in the woods, if we may so call it, seems also to lie behind and lend a sort of veiled personal witness to the next two lectures, those on mysticism, which was even more important to James than voluntary poverty.