Art. 2.-WILLIAM JAMES.

1. The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry James. 2 vols. Longmans, 1920.

2. Collected Essays and Reviews. By William James. Longmans, 1920.

3. The Principles of Psychology. By William James. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1890.

And other works by the same.

THE Letters of William James are the fascinating record, belated but all the more welcome, of a great personality. Now the jewel of personality has many facets-perhaps their number is infinite in posse-whereby it responds to the stimulus of other souls, and flashes back upon them sparks of its own inherent fire, which nevertheless, in proportion as the reacting soul is sensitive and sympathetic, display a distinctive colouring, appropriate to the individual stimulus. Unfortunately such displays are rare. The necessities of life compel us ordinarily to conceal our personality. Like the larva of the caddis-fly, the soul secretes around it a protective tube of sand and dirt and shells, of rubbish and convention, ensconces itself in artificial darkness, and not infrequently dies therein, of inanition. It is only a few who dare to be themselves, and to reveal themselves. But they are the most interesting and delightful of persons; for, after all, there is nothing men relish more than personality. They come out in their letters better than in autobiographies, which always tempt to a pose, or in biographies, which nearly always tone down personality, and blur its outlines. One cannot but applaud therefore the rare act of filial self-denial by which Mr Henry James has allowed his father to speak for himself and given to the world these wonderful letters, embedded in a minimum of connective tissue, instead of a more conventional Life.' But he has shown excellent judgment and the literary art which is hereditary in his family by his selection of his material; this was very abundant, because any one who ever received a letter from William James would be sure to keep it. One could wish perhaps that he had not selected quite so severely, and had given us four volumes instead of two; but by excluding most of the

technical philosophy he has succeeded in exhibiting the enormous range of his father's interests in all sorts and conditions of men, and the many facets of his personality.

This method of selection is well calculated to bring out the vital fact that the best sort of letters is literally a 'correspondence,' and reveals, not only the writer, but also his endeavour to attune himself to the demands and interests of another, and so, indirectly, the person written to. It is marvellous how James succeeds in adapting himself to different personalities. He is equally a model and a delight when praising his son Henry's (æt. 8) improved hand-writing:

'So well written that I wondered whose hand it was, and never thought it might be yours. Your tooth also was a precious memorial—I hope you'll get a better one in its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out. They ought to go into the Peabody Museum. If any of George Washington's baby-teeth had been kept till now, they would be put somewhere in a public museum for the world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that if you grow up to be a second George Washington, I may sell it to a Museum' (I, p. 276).

or when telling his son William (æt. 6) about some performing seals,

'the loveliest beasts, with big black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags' (1, p. 278).

or his daughter (at. 8) about

'an immense mastiff, so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf. His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are magnificent, his tail keeps wagging all the time, and he makes on me the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good' (II, p. 26).

or again when coaxing a desiccated philosopher into taking a less pedantic view of a human problem:

'If the world is a Unit there are no sides-there's the moral rub! And you don't see it! Ah, Hodgson! Hodgson mio from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers! Perchè di tanto

inganni i figli tuoi? If you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us to Evil, but don't talk of the distinction between impediments from within and without when the within and without of which you speak are both within that Whole which is the only real agent in your philosophy' (1, p. 246).

Or again listen to his description of his brother Henry's style:

'You know how opposed your whole "third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it for ever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you do it, that's the queerness' (II, p. 277).

Or read finally his penetrating estimate of Shakespeare (II, p. 335):

'Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless that's the way to write about Shakespeare. . . He seems to me to have been a professional amuser, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendour added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperesthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy, but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect? But halte-là! or I shall become a Harris myself!'

It is difficult for a reader of these intensely vivacious and spontaneous outpourings to believe that the same qualities, when they enliven James's books, were the fruit of long incubation and laboured composition, as he himself always maintained. Perhaps what he meant was that the repression of his personality, and the toningdown of his exuberance, was the painful process that cost time and effort. But there is no noticeable difference between his books and his letters; and, if the style is the man, he is equally himself in both. Both abound in the same vividness, lucidity, fertility of illustration, and a pure Irish sense of fun, which had no doubt descended to him from an ancestry that came almost entirely from Ulster.

As in his letters, so he was in speech; always original, racy, vitalising, virile, utterly devoid of any sort of hauteur, humbug, and pretence, and genuinely interested in any human soul that crossed his path. Well do I remember how I took him round one afternoon to an eminent psychologist whom he desired to meet and with whom he was anxious to exchange views; but, when an undergraduate happened to come in who was suffering from an obsession, theoretic psychology was promptly put aside and James talked to him about his troubles for the rest of his visit! It was no wonder that, within five minutes of meeting him, men found themselves talking to James as if they had known him all their life. He had also, it must be confessed, a peculiar fascination for 'cranks,' who are much more sensitive than professors to the human appeal. James listened to them with unending patience, sympathised, counselled, and sent them away comforted; but he utilised them as well, and had a deadly way of mobilising a quotation from some pet crank to ridicule and confound any theory he was upsetting. In short, his greatness was securely rooted in his personality.

William James was a great man; the greatest, probably, who has yet taken birth' in the Great Republic. He was also a great philosopher, one of the half-dozen who have made an epoch and given a new direction to the deepest, and dimmest, nisus of the human soul. But he was a great philosopher, because he was a great

man; a great man essentially, a philosopher consequentially. Nor did he achieve philosophic greatness by retiring from the world and suppressing his feelings; his personality, and his belief in personality, are the clue to all his philosophic achievements. It was because he believed in personality, and possessed so sympathetic and attractive a personality himself, that he developed his open-mindedness, his freshness of thought, and his directness of approach to the problems of life. It was the source also of his democratic appreciation of every sort of human endeavour; for the essence, both of democracy as a political ideal, and of Christianity as a specific religion, is just the value of personality. His belief in it could extract from an unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance' the profound dictum that there is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is is very important,' and entitled him to quote and adopt it;* for he was ever exploring its possibilities, and thoroughly lived up to it himself. It was, moreover, because he believed in, studied, and loved personality that he became the incomparable psychologist he was. It was because he was a great psychologist that he became a great philosopher who inexorably brought shrivelled shibboleths and arid formulas to the test of immediate psychical experience, and broke down the artificial barriers erected between psychology and philosophy by the Brahmins of the academic caste.

His personality constituted both the glory and the tragedy of James's life. On the one hand multitudes were drawn towards him, to bask in its rays; but they absorbed much time and energy that might otherwise have augmented his literary fecundity, and have gone to make his views more ponderously systematic in their form and so more impressive to his philosophic confrères. These were filled with envy of James's popularity, and not by nature at all disposed to gloat over him, but rather to be shocked. For in the academic world a personality like James is inevitably something of an anomaly; having the effect, if not precisely of a bull in a china-shop, yet of a vacuum-cleaner in a 'museum of

* Will to Believe,' p. 256; cf. 'Essays and Reviews,' p. 149.