know nothing so sad and spectral in the shape of literature. It seems composed by skeletons and intended for readers who are content to disown their good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly mechanism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you spiritually, to be so nearly connected with all that sadness and silence, where nothing more musical is heard than the occasional jostling of bone by bone. Do come out of it before you wither as an autumn leaf, which no longer rustles in full-veined life on the pliant bough, but rattles instead with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy earth.
Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendliness towards me, and speak to you therefore in return with all the frankness of friendship.
Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours cordially,
A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately been preserved. "A week before Father died," says this entry, "I asked him one day whether he had thought what he should like to have done about his funeral. He was immediately very much interested, not having apparently thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then said with the greatest solemnity and looking so majestic: 'Tell him to say only this: "Here lies a man, who has thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don't let him say a word more!'"
Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his pen, his family, and his friends. The first three he could carry about with him, and did carry along on numerous restless and extended journeys. From friends, even when he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he was never quite separated, for he always maintained a wide correspondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly. He was so sociable and so independent and lively a talker, that he entered into hearty relations with interesting people wherever he went. Thackeray was a familiar visitor at his apartment in Paris when his older children were just old enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not carry him as far as the theological disquisitions. "I suppose there was not in his day," said E. L. Godkin, "a more formidable master of English style."13 In his conversation the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his indignation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He loved to talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by an exposition of his own views, but in order to stir him up and rouse him to discussion and rejoinder. At home he was not above espousing the queerest of opinions, if by so doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and ride him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were exciting. 'The adipose and affectionate Wilky,' as his father called him, would say something and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob, the youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry (Junior) would emerge from his silence in defence of Wilky. Then Bob would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down vigorously into the arena, and when, in the excited argument, the dinner-knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear Mrs. James, more conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would look at me, laughingly reassuring, saying, 'Don't be disturbed; they won't stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.' And the quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling, close to the combatants. Mr. James considered this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys. In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement, the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always showed. Even if they blundered, they saved themselves by wit."14 It was certainly to their father's talk, to the influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to the attention-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he perverted the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy, that both William and Henry owed much of their own wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They used often to exaggerate their father's tricks of utterance, for he would have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for his children's wit, and the business of outdoing the head of the family in the matter of language was an exercise familiar to all his sons.15 Whoever knew them will remember that their everyday diction displayed a natural command of such words and figures as most men cannot use gracefully except when composing with pen in hand.
Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James, Senior's, presence in the lives of his children, it should be made clear that he never had any "business" or profession to interfere with "his almost eccentrically home-loving habit." During the years of moving about Europe, during the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon its inner social resources. The children were constantly with their parents and with each other, and they continued all their lives to be united by much stronger attachments than usually exist between members of one family.
William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the important points are clear. The family, including by this time three younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry attended the Collège through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the Collège de Boulogne, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday, was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at Newport, there was another European migration—this time to Geneva for the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as the present University was still called. He subsequently described himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an excellent familiarity with French—such, in conventional terms, was the net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian, and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.
He seldom referred to his schooling with anything but contempt, and usually dismissed all reference to it by saying that he "never had any." But, as is often the case with even those boys who follow a regular curriculum, his amusements and excursions beyond the bounds of his prescribed studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any of his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge showed itself early. He once recalled a trivial incident which illustrates this, though he apparently remembered it because he realized, young as he was when it occurred, that it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his mind and the cast of Henry's. As readers of the "Small Boy" will remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of ten, was already animated by a secret passion for authorship, and used to confide his literary efforts to folio sheets, which he stored in a copy-book and which he tried to conceal from his tormenting brother. But William came upon them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a drawing to represent a mother and child clinging to a rock in the midst of a stormy ocean and that he had inscribed under it: "The thunder roared and the lightning followed!" William saw the meteorological blunder immediately; he fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive romancer about it so unmercifully that the occasion had to be marked by punishments and the inauguration of a maternal protectorate over the copy-book. About four years later, when he was fifteen years old, his father
Some passages in William James's early letters to his family might seem labored. They should be read with this in mind. An especially high-sounding phrase or a flight into a grand style was understood as a signal meaning "fun," and such passages are never to be taken as serious.
