WM. JAMES.
Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Münsterberg, and all.
To Miss Grace Norton.
FLORENCE, Dec. 28, 1892.
My dear Grace,—I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!—but have you never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate—a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if you were finite too—for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable laziness—a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.—However, it is dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.
You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.
The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler—"Maestro" she calls him—three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.
Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here—I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as basking in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house?
Duveneck[104] is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.
I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,