to him to address the Philosophical Club at the University of California.
To G. H. Howison
Dear Howison,—Your kind letter greeted me on my arrival here three days ago—but I have waited to answer it in order to determine just what my lecture's title should be. I wanted to make something entirely popular, and as it were emotional, for technicality seems to me to spell "failure" in philosophy. But the subject in the margin of my consciousness failed to make connexion with the centre, and I have fallen back on something less vital, but still, I think, sufficiently popular and practical, which you can advertise under the rather ill-chosen title of "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," if you wish.
I am just back from a month of practical idleness in the Adirondacks, but such is the infirmity of my complexion that I am not yet in proper working trim. You ask me, like an angel, in what form I like to take my sociability. The spirit is willing to take it in any form, but the flesh is weak, and it runs to destruction of nerve-tissue and madness in me to go to big stand-up receptions where the people scream and breathe in each other's faces. But I know my duties; and one such reception I will gladly face. For the rest, I should infinitely prefer a chosen few at dinner. But this enterprise is going, my friend, to give you and Mrs. Howison a heap of trouble. My purpose is to arrive on the eve of the 26th. I will telegraph you the hour and train. When the lectures to the teachers are over, I will make for the Yosemite Valley, where I want to spend a fortnight if I can, and come home.... Yours ever truly,
To Henry James
Dear old Henry,—You see I have worked my way across the Continent, and, full of the impressions of this queer place, I must overflow for a page or two to you. I saw some really grand and ferocious scenery on the Canadian Pacific, and wish I could go right back to see it again. But it doesn't mean much, on the whole, for human habitation, and the British Empire's investment in Canada is in so far forth but scenic. It is grand, though, in its vastness and simplicity. In Washington and Oregon the whole foreground consisted of desolation by fire. The magnificent coniferous forests burnt and burning, as they have been for years and years back. Northern California one pulverous earth-colored mass of hills and heat, with green spots produced by irrigation hardly showing on the background. I drove through a wheatfield at Harry's Uncle Christopher's on a machine, drawn by 26 mules, which cut a swathe 18 feet wide through the wheat and threw it out in bags to be taken home, as fast as the leisurely mules could walk. It is like Egypt. Down here, splendid air, and a city so indescribably odd and unique in its suggestions that I have been saying to myself all day that you ought to have taken it in when you were under 30 and added it to your portraits of places. So remote and terminal, so full of the sea-port nakedness, yet so new and American, with its queer suggestions of a history based on the fifties and the sixties. But at my age those impressions are curiously weak to what they once were, and the time to travel is between one's 20th and 30th year. This hotel—an old house cleaned into newness—is redolent of '59 or '60, when it must have been built. Hideous vast stuccoed thing, with long undulating balustrades and wells and lace curtains. The fare is very good, but the servants all Irish, who seem cowed in the dining-room, and go about as if they had corns on their feet and for that reason had given up the pick and shovel.... Tomorrow, in spite of drouth and dust, I leave for the Yosemite Valley, with a young Californian philosopher, named [Charles M.] Bakewell, as companion. On the whole I prefer the works of God to those of man, and the alternative, a trip down the coast, beauties as it would doubtless show, would include too much humanity....
To his Son Alexander
Darling old Cherubini,—See how brave this girl and boy are in the Yosemite Valley!22 I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house had shot a little wolf called a coyote in the early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully—and losing it—just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else we won't be worth as much as that little coyote. Your mother can find a picture of him in those green books of animals, and I want you to copy it. Your loving
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet
Dear old Rosina,—I have seen your native state and even been driven by dear, good, sweet Hal Dibblee (who is turning into a perfectly ideal fellow) through the charming and utterly lovable place in which you all passed your childhood. (How your mother must sometimes long for it again!) Of California and its greatness, the half can never be told. I have been on a ranch in the white, bare dryness of Siskiyou County, and reaped wheat with a swathe of 18 feet wide on a machine drawn by a procession of 26 mules. I've been to Yosemite, and camped for five days in the high Sierras; I've lectured at the two universities of the state, and seen the youths and maidens lounge together at Stanford in cloisters whose architecture is purer and more lovely than aught that Italy can show. I've heard Mrs. Dibblee read letter after letter from Anita concerning your life together; and even one letter to Anita from Bay, which the former enclosed. (Dear Bay!) All this, dear old Rosina, is a "summation of stimuli" which at last carries me over the dam that has so long obstructed all my epistolary efforts in your direction.
Over and over again I have been on the point of writing to you, more than once I have actually written a page or two, but something has always checked the flow, and arrested the current of the soul. What is it? I think it is this: I naturally tend, when "familiar" with what the authors of the beginning of the century used to call "a refined female," to indulge in chaffing personalities in writing to her. There is something in you that doubtfully enjoys the chaffing; and subtly feeling that, I stop. But some day, when experience shall have winnowed you with her wing; when the illusions and the hopes of youth alike are faded; when eternal principles of order are more to you than sensations that pass in a day, however exciting; when friends that know you and your roots and derivations are more satisfactory, however humdrum and hoary they be, than the handsome recent acquaintances that know nothing of you but the hour; when, in short, your being is mellowed, dulled and harmonized by time so as to be a grave, wise, deep, and discerning moral and intellectual unity (as mine is already from the height of my 40 centuries!), then, Rosina, we two shall be the most perfect of combinations, and I shall write to you every week of my life and you will be utterly unable to resist replying. That will not be, however, before you are forty years old. You are sure to come to it! For you see the truth, irrespective of persons, as few people see it; and after all, you care for that more than for anything else—and that means a rare and unusual destiny, and ultimate salvation.—But here I am, chaffing, quite against my intentions and altogether in spite of myself. The ruling passion is irresistible. Let me stop!
But still I must be personal, and not write merely of the climate and productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24 hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and Bay (and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How I should like to hear you hold forth about the French, their art, their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should like to hear you talk French! How I should like to note the changes wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it. Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot,
Photograph of a boy and girl standing on a rock which hangs dizzily over a great precipice above the Yosemite Valley.
