DESPITE EMERSON’S ROUSING CALL to stick fast to his own work, James went on much as he always had, scattering his energy and attention this way and that. The scattershot variety of his undertaking was his own real work. He was a pluralist to the bone. It is the monist—self-confessed or not—who can organize a life around one central project, saying no to all offers and openings that may distract from the singular objective. F. Scott Fitzgerald said life is, after all, more successfully looked at from a single window. It is a truth—if it is a truth—for which James might have had some sympathy but no lasting patience. His ideal house contained not one window but many doors, all leading outside—like Chocorua when he first saw it.
Yet in mid-August of 1903 he was once again caught up in the desire to wrap up his life work in a grand synthesis, a system, his own philosophical system. “I actually dread to die,” he wrote a friend, “until I have settled the Universe’s hash in one more book, which shall be epochmachend at last, and a title of honor to my children!” James could never quite shake the yearning for permanence and completion; he had himself the quality he had recently observed in the buildings going up in New York City, with their “transient intention of duration.” Henry Thoreau never finished the vast “Concord Calendar” he spent his later years on, and Emerson never got his natural history of intellect into a shape that satisfied him. But Thoreau’s Journal is the grand calendar of Concord, and Emerson’s complete works could as well be called the Natural History of Intellect.1 There are other kinds of completion besides the formally rounded structure of a culminating book.
Back in June, Harvard conferred an honorary degree on James. He attended a long dinner at Memorial Hall, where he made a short speech he had written and memorized for the occasion. He called it “The True Harvard.” The visible Harvard of 1903 was a fast-growing, ever more imposing place. The number of students had risen from 1,200 in 1890 to 1,800 by the end of the century. The faculty had grown from 90 to 134. New buildings were springing up: Stillman Infirmary in 1900, the Harvard Union (an effort to democratize the school by providing club-like facilities for the unclubbed) and Lowell Lecture Hall in 1901.
But what fixed the architectural tone of the new era as “imperial Harvard” was the large Greco-Roman coliseum that went up across the Charles River in 1902 and 1903 and the erection of the Memorial Fence around Harvard Yard beginning in 1901. The fence was a huge wrought-iron enclosure of elaborate design, hung on large brick pillars. The fence decisively separated the college from the town, especially from Harvard Square, much to the delight of Henry James, who, when he saw it, rejoiced that America had at last produced something fine enough to want to keep it separate. Not everyone felt that way.
Old departments grew and new ones came into existence. The English department, with George Lyman Kittredge, Barrett Wendell, and Charles T. Copeland, was beginning to attract attention. Sociology started out, as had psychology, in association with philosophy, in the new Emerson Hall. The philosophy department itself included Santayana, Royce, Münsterberg, Palmer, and James. It was, says a modern historian of philosophy in America, “the most famous department of philosophy of which any American University has been able to boast.”2
Student life was dominated not by study but by social life, by the clubs, and by sports. There was a new spirit of freedom. Students were free to take any course they wanted, were free from compulsory chapel, and free to attend classes or not after 1886. One student went to Havana, leaving a stack of predated letters for his roommate to mail home at suitable intervals. Somehow a maid put the whole lot in the mail at once. When the surprised father showed up in Cambridge, no one in authority had the slightest idea where the student in question was. Taking attendance was reinstated—though attendance at classes was still not required.
The old Lawrence Scientific School in which James had studied was quietly folded into Harvard College between 1889 and 1891; Radcliffe College for women was chartered in 1894. Private entrepreneurs built ever more expensive and luxurious apartment buildings for wealthier students along Mount Auburn Street, which became known as the Gold Coast. Less affluent students lived in college dorms, which looked like the old brick mill buildings of New England.
Social class divisions were widening. Logan Pearsall Smith wrote that in the 1880s “the atmosphere of Harvard was... richly colored by the sense of social differences. The prestige possessed by members of the most exclusive clubs, the delight of being seen in their company, and the hope of being admitted into their select circles—these were the animating motives of life at Harvard as I knew it.” Santayana, in the early 1890s, noted that the “divisions of wealth and breeding are not made conspicuous at Yale as at Harvard by the neighborhood of a city with well-marked social sets, the most fashionable of which sends all its boys to the college.” Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian of Harvard who graduated in 1908, observed, “Since 1890 it has been almost necessary for a Harvard student with social ambitions to enter from the ‘right’ sort of school and be popular there, to room on the ‘Gold Coast’ and be accepted by Boston society his freshman year, in order to be on the right side of the social chasm.”
One of the few things other than preestablished social status that could help the process of acceptance was earning a place on the freshman crew, which James’s second son, Bill, did in 1900. Two years later, Bill was coming under increasing, and increasingly unwelcome, social pressure. At twenty he was “undergoing the curious experience of a real nausea at too much success in social lines,” William wrote Henry in July 1902. “He has been elected captain of the University Crew for next year, an exceedingly laborious, responsible and publicly prominent position and is fairly sick at heart at the prospect of another year of politics and publicity and exterminating physical training, with no opportunity for inner leisure or advance in study, and all for the sake of an end so essentially childish as spending 20 minutes a year hence rowing a few seconds faster than a crew from Yale.” Bill’s response to the situation was, after some inner turmoil, to resign as captain of the crew, go to Europe, and spend most of the academic year 1902–03 in premedical studies in Germany.3
William James had Bill as well as himself in mind when he made his little dinner speech on receiving the honorary degree. In the talk he did not go after the big new imperial Harvard, or even athletics, the new emphasis on which he more or less approved, within limits. But he did go after the club life and the social system, on behalf of the loners, the “undisciplinables,” the outsiders “with whom I belong.” He began by insisting, “I am not an alumnus of the college. I have not even a degree from the scientific school, in which I did some study forty years ago. I have no right to vote for Overseers and I have never felt until today as if I were a child of the house of Harvard in the fullest sense.”
After the personal part of the talk, he turned a cold eye on the larger world, the Harvard of the Gilded Age he saw all around him. “If we were asked that disagreeable question ‘what are the bosom vices of the level of culture which our land and day have reached?’ we should be forced, I think, to give the still more disagreeable answer that they are swindling and adroitness, and the indulgence of swindling and adroitness, and cant, and sympathy with cant—natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of ‘success’ in the mere outward sense of ‘getting-there,’ and getting-there on as big a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation.” Then James drew a straight line between worldly success and social success in college. “In the successful sense, then, in the worldly sense, in the club sense, to be a college man, even a Harvard Man, affords no sure guarantee for anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar ends.” (Emerson had spoken of how colleges could produce a “more instructed fool”; from this point on in James’s life there are frequent Emersonian echoes in some of his best phrases.)
At the climax of the speech, James asked, with rhetorical despair, “Is there no inner Harvard” within this outer and empty social shell? Is there not something “for which the outside men, who come here in such numbers, come?” Those who “come from the remotest outskirts... without introductions, without school-affiliations, special students, scientific students, graduate students, poor students... who make their living as they go”? Yes, said James, “there is such an inner spiritual Harvard, and the men I speak of, and for whom I speak today, are its true missionaries and carry its gospel into infidel parts.” These students do not come to Harvard for the club life, but “because they have heard of her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice.” Nothing but religious language will do for James here. “The true church was always the invisible church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons.”4
James loved these outsiders, the “undisciplinables” who he said were “our finest product.” He identified with them, considered himself one of them, and was pleased with his son Bill’s revolt. But in one crucial way James was no longer an outsider at Harvard. His outsider’s independence was, in many eyes, the essence of the place, and he himself, without intending any such thing, had become the visible embodiment of the best of Harvard. President Eliot was well aware of this, and when, in December 1903, James sent in his letter of resignation, Eliot flatly refused to consider it, explaining that he did not want Harvard’s name separated from James’s in the public mind.