The Letters of William James, Vol. 1. William James
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mother "many cares." It had been the purpose of the first William James to provide that his children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid; and his children became financially independent as fast as they came of age. Most of them were blessed with a liberal allowance of that combination of gayety, volubility, and waywardness which is popularly conceded to the Irish; but these qualities, which made them "charming" and "interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them from dissipating both respectable talents and unusual opportunities. Two of the men—William, namely, who became an eccentric but highly respected figure in the Presbyterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be said shortly—possessed an ardor of intellect that neither disaster nor good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole the personalities and histories of that generation were such as to have impressed the boyish mind of the writer of the following letters and of his younger brother like a richly colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns changed and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occasional dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead and gone, the memory of them certainly prompted the author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he described Minny Theale's New York forebears as "an extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls," to have known whom and to have belonged to whom "was to have had one's small world-space both crowded and enlarged."
It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one member of that generation.
Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine, was born in 1811. He was apparently a boy of unusual activity and animal spirits, but at the age of thirteen he met with an accident which maimed him for life. He was, at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one of his fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote the following account of what happened. (The Professor Henry referred to was Joseph Henry, later the head of the Smithsonian Institute.)
"On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet Professor Henry in the Park, in front of the Academy, where amusements and instruction would be given in balloon-flying, the motive power being heated air supplied from a tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the boys, when it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One day when] young James had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of these balls was sent into the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist's stable. [James], thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out the flame, but burned his leg."
The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years, and one leg was twice amputated above the knee. He was robust enough to survive this long and dire experience of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to establish right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and ample facilities for transportation were to be had.
In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady, and in 1835 entered the Princeton Theological Seminary with the class of '39. By the time he had completed two years of his Seminary course, his discontent with the orthodox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already conceived some measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.
In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came from Killingsley,5 County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear Boy—that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked her two elder sons.
During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James, Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.6 Shortly afterwards the family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April 15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the correspondence that follows.
William James derived so much from his father and resembled him so strikingly in many ways that it is worth while to dwell a little longer on the character, manners, and beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was not only an impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of his children, but always continued to be for them the most vivid and interesting personality who had crossed the horizon of their experience. He was their constant companion, and entered into their interests and poured out his own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and affectionate.
His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters rather than that of an American of today,"7 reveal him richly to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in "A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons.
The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843. "Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my living kind—not my talking kind—by life only; a word perhaps of that communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner method—learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with earthliness—to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the laws of these appearances that swim round us in God's great museum—to get hold of some central facts which may make all other facts
According to the Rev. Hugh Walsh of Newburgh, who has worked out the Walsh genealogy.