Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken literally, but may be presumed to be indicative. It is told of him, for instance, that one afternoon shortly after he had married for the third time, he saw a lady coming up the steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry Mrs. James was not in." But the poor lady was herself his newly married wife, and cried out to him not to be "so absent-minded." He discovered one day that a man with whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and immediately seized him by the collar and marched him through the streets to a justice. "When old Billy James came to Syracuse," said a citizen who could remember his visits, "things went as he wished."
In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street he kept open house and gave a special welcome to members of the Presbyterian ministry. One of his sons said of him: "He was certainly a very easy parent—weakly, nay painfully sensitive to his children's claims upon his sympathy." "The law of the house, within the limits of religious decency, was freedom itself."[1] Indeed, there appears to have been only one matter in which he was rigorous with his family: his Presbyterianism was of the stiffest kind, and in his old age he sacrificed even his affections for what he considered the true faith. Theological differences estranged him from two of his sons,—William and Henry,—and though the old man became reconciled to one of them a few days before his death, he left a will which would have cut them both off with small annuities if its elaborate provisions had been sustained by the Court.
In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine Barber,[2] a daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange County, New York. The Barbers had been active people in the affairs of their day. Catherine's grandfather had been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her father and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary Army. One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously graduated from Princeton and had conducted a boarding-school for boys at "Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which Alexander Hamilton prepared for college. During the war he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was detailed by Washington to be one of Steuben's four aides, and performed other staff-duties. John, Catherine's father, returned to Montgomery after the Revolution, was one of the founders of Montgomery Academy, an associate judge of the County Court, a member of the state legislature, and a church elder for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior's, reminiscences there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much addicted to the reading of military history, and which contrasts his stoicism with his wife's warm and spontaneous temperament and her exceptional gift of interesting her grandchildren in conversation.[3]
In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is described as having been "a good wife and mother, nothing else—save, to be sure, a kindly friend and neighbor" and "the most democratic person by temperament I ever knew."[4] She adopted the three children of her husband's prior marriages and, by their own account, treated them no differently from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself bore and brought up. She managed her husband's large house during his lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after his death kept it open as a home for children, and grandchildren, and cousins as well. This "dear gentle lady of many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment in addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generosity in all things; for admiration as well as affection and gratitude still attend her memory after the lapse of sixty years.
The next generation, eleven in number as has already been said,[5] may well have given their widowed 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.