69. William James at Sixty

JAMES RETAINED IN 1902 much of the appearance Santayana had noted ten years earlier: he was still “erect, brisk,...intensely masculine.” But now his light beard was mostly gray; his age was beginning to show. His face was, in some lights, deeply lined. His hands, however, were expressive, brown, and strong.¹ The sadness his friend John Jay Chapman had noted was still there; so was the playfulness of the James who might run out naked under the garden hose at midnight on a hot July night in Cambridge. When another friend called him “the greatest philosopher of our country,” James replied, “God help the country.” When an enthusiastic clergyman wrote James that he was of the company of Isaiah and Saint Paul, James replied, “Why drag in Saint Paul and Isaiah?”²

As his son reminds us, William James was always “one half an artist. His imagination played over and around everything that held his attention. [A] penumbra of feeling always enveloped his thought. An idea might give him a pain in the thorax.”³ His life, even in his later years, was never more than semisettled. Still, he had evolved some routines and habits. He took a nap every afternoon from two to three. He made it a rule to write a note after every social visit, whether he was guest or host. He tried to live up to his conviction that every claim on him imposed an obligation, feeling, as he told one student, that if he failed to meet such claims his inner resources would dry up. He still traveled alone for several weeks in June after classes were over, and he almost always got away by himself to Keene Valley in September before school started up again.

The rest of the time—most of the time—he lived with Alice and his children in Cambridge. His neurasthenia came and went, but his heart was now a constant source of worry; after any physical exertion he could expect an attack of angina. He slept badly, as he always had. His preferred cures were, for neurasthenia, mind cure (a Boston practitioner, Mrs. A. B. Newman, seemed particularly effective); for his heart, a trip to Bad Nauheim; for feeling rundown or seedy, he preferred self-administered galvanism (that is, electrotherapy) or the Roberts-Hawley lymph-compound injections; for sleeplessness, he took chloroform or chloral hydrate or Veronal.⁴

Through all this, the core of James’s temperament stayed the same in one vital respect: he had a permanent and insatiable craving for change. “Change,” he told Pauline Goldmark, “is... perhaps the most imperative of human needs.” A complex changeableness marks every aspect of his life and work. It did not produce peace of mind. Writing to his wife about his restless sociability, he said, “Strange that when I enjoy society so much an und fur sich [for its own sake] it should have the power of making me ill and poisoning me physically as nothing else does.”⁵

Most photographs of James are of a stern, composed, unsmiling man; invariably he looks older than the date of the picture. But something is missing. The photographs do not square with descriptions of him by family and friends, which almost always describe him as active, vivacious, humorous, playful, energetic, and, said Royce, “eternally young.”⁶ There is one exception, a pair of photos taken of James and Royce sitting on a stone wall at Chocorua in 1903. In the first, Royce is talking; his brow is furrowed, his gaze lowered. His hands lie folded and composed on his right leg, which is crossed over the left. James sits next to him, listening, his face the usual mask, his feet dangling, his powerful knotted hands bunched loosely in his lap. The next instant—in the other photo—James has a broad smile on his face, has turned toward Royce, and has snapped his right hand up to point a finger at Royce, who has pulled back his shoulders, broken into a smile, and looked up at James. The two photos, like a miniature film clip, give an unmistakable impression of James’s liveliness.

The Varieties of Religious Experience sold phenomenally well from the start, although the reviews were mixed. James noted wryly that the book “seems to add fuel to the fire that burns in the hearts of God’s enemies as well as to that which burns in those of his friends.”⁷ The book was and is a standing affront to people committed to defending the particulars of their own religion as the best, if not the only, variety, but it cheered many, on the other hand, who had become disillusioned with institutional religion. James said he got more letters about the Varieties than about all his other writings put together.⁸

One journalist told James he had saved her life; she wrote him a letter that began, “O King! Live Forever!” Of course his friends admired the book; some even agreed with parts of it. The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach wrote that it “has gripped me powerfully. Religious inspiration is certainly very similar to the scientific inspiration which one feels when new problems first present themselves.”⁹ Arrangements were soon made for translations into French, Dutch, and German. In Spain, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s early reading of the book marked a turning point in his thought.¹⁰ Harvard’s President Eliot had his doubts about the veracity of some of James’s informants. Starbuck, from whom James took a great deal of material, was admiring and grateful: “It is something to live for to be noticed in such [a] book.”¹¹ The popularity of the Varieties helped considerably to establish the prestige of the Gifford Lectures and set the standard by which they are still judged.¹²

Another mark of the book’s success is how well it did with readers. It sold 11,500 copies the first year. It was an expensive book; at $3.20 a copy it cost more than three times what Pragmatism would sell for three years later. As with Talks to Teachers, James himself paid for the production of the book; he took the manuscript to Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Press in Cambridge to be printed. Longmans, Green, the ostensible publisher, sold it on consignment. James’s contract seems not to have survived. If James got half the list price, which seems a reasonable figure, he would have cleared $10,000 after expenses for just the first year’s sales. Varieties made James a rich man, as he admitted to a correspondent.¹³

An important part of the cultural setting for his new book was revivalism. James met professors in Edinburgh who “assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one of Moody’s partners.”¹⁴ Dwight Moody was a farm boy from Northampton, Massachusetts, who had run a rescue mission in Chicago among the very poor in the Sands district, north of the Chicago River. He had enjoyed his first big success in Great Britain, where, in 1873 and 1874, he had drawn to his revival meetings between three and four million people. His message then—and later in America, where extra trolley tracks were laid to accommodate his crowds—was simple: “Holding aloft his Bible, he assured his hearers that eternal life was theirs for the asking, that they only had to come forward and t-a-k-e, TAKE.”¹⁵ The road was wide, the gate stood open, the burden was light.

Moody retired in 1892, but his place was soon filled by Billy Sunday. Sunday, another farm boy, this time from Iowa, had been, among other things, an outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings before his conversion. He began holding revival meetings in Garner, Iowa, in 1895 or 1896. He reached ever larger crowds until, in 1917 in New York, he notched more than 1.4 million attendees and presided over 98,000 conversions. Sunday put on a grand show. “Accompanying his contortions, furniture smashing and partial undressing was an unbroken torrent of words. What the church needed,” he shouted, was fighting men of God, not “hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mushy-fisted, jelly-spined, pussy-footing, four-flushing Charlotte-russe Christians.”¹⁶

The first audience of the Varieties was probably not among the revival seekers but among reading people during the time of revivals, the time we now recognize as the modern era—our era.¹⁷ In 1902 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” first saw print. Helen Keller’s Story of My Life appeared, as did Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Captain Craig. In that year Dewey’s The Educational Situation, Gide’s Immoralist, and Gorky’s The Lower Depths were published. Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan premiered in Dublin. Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger came out the following year. In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, and Mary Austin brought out The Land of Little Rain. Gertrude Stein had just settled in Paris and was beginning to buy the paintings of Paul Cézanne. Bertrand Russell published Principles of Mathematics. James read Robinson, knew Dewey and Keller, and would meet Gorky; Du Bois and Stein (and Theodore Roosevelt) had been his students; he had encouraged Austin and knew Russell.

The world at the turn of the century was becoming mechanized. A Packard accomplished the first automobile trip across the United States, going from San Francisco to New York in fifty-two days. Electric trolleys began running on city streets, Henry Ford organized the Ford Motor Company, and Roosevelt intervened in a coal strike on behalf of the miners. Motor taxis appeared in London, and in North Carolina the Wright brothers made the first manned flight at Kitty Hawk. As if in protest, the first Tour de France bicycle race was held.

American music was changing. In 1903, when Picasso was in his blue period, a band leader named W. C. Handy heard a man at a train station in Mississippi playing slide guitar with a knife and singing what Handy called “the weirdest music I ever heard,” soon to be called the blues. The dramatic contrast between the onrushing present and the fast-vanishing past struck Henry Adams, who polarized it as a contrast between thirteenth-century worship of the Virgin and modern worship of the dynamo or generator. In 1902 the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium that year, and the next year won the Nobel. Around that time Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? were published. The Bolsheviks appeared in 1903, and the Russian Revolution began in 1905. Sun Yat-sen was stirring in China and organizing to expel the Manchus.

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” asked the fifteenth-century poet François Villon. Modernity’s cold response, it could be said, was formulated in 1905 by Einstein: E = mc². Einstein’s equation for the equivalence of mass and energy, and James’s assertion of the equivalence of thought and thinker, forged, together with modern art and modern music, a new world, a world James both lived in and helped bring about.

 

In mid-June 1902 he returned to Cambridge. In mid-July he gave a series of lectures at the Harvard Summer School of Theology. Called, stiffly, “Intellect and Feeling in Religion,” they were a sort of plain man’s Gifford Lectures, endorsing what Carlyle had called “natural supernaturalism” as the rescuer of religion. James aligned himself with “spontaneous thought, with metaphysicians and scientists both against me.” He quoted Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”: “...the dog returns to his vomit, and the sow returns to her mire / And the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.” He ended with a sort of reckless lightheartedness, encouraging his audience to think “that by following up the clues set by all this private regenerative methodistical experience we may gain insight into the meaning of the Universe... One may be a Methodist,” he concluded, “without even being a Christian.”¹⁸

Though he later repudiated these lectures (writing on the folder that contains them “Trash. Never to be printed”), the notes for them—and they are only notes, they were never written out—still convey James’s liveliness as a lecturer. Arguing that “the way an individual’s life comes home to him” is what matters, that not the church but God is the individual’s “only adequate understander and companion,” James goes on, “Don’t you agree?—Can there be doubt?—Isn’t this religion?”¹⁹

In August came word that Holmes had been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the two men were no longer close, moving now in different circles and in different directions, James sent congratulations, saying the new position was Holmes’s “natural place”; he also sent a copy of his new book. Holmes’s reply was brief but warm, referring as he did to a time and relationship that were lost. His remark had a touch of the blues. “Some day,” he wrote, “we shall talk together again with that intimacy of understanding and mutual stimulus which we have known and which I never forget.”²⁰