To Henry James.
NEWPORT, June 3, 1876.
My dear H.,—I write you after [a] considerable interval filled with too much work and weariness to make letter-writing convenient.... I ran away three days ago, the recitations being over for the year, in order to break from the studious associations of home. I have been staying at the Tweedies with Mrs. Chapman, and James Sturgis and his wife, and enjoying extremely, not the conversation indoors, but the lonely lying on the grass on the cliffs at Lyly Pond, and four or five hours yesterday at the Dumplings, feeling the moving air and the gentle living sea. There is a purity and mildness about the elements here which purges the soul of one. And I have been as if I had taken opium, not wanting to do anything else than the particular thing I happened to be doing at the moment, and feeling equally good whether I stood or walked or lay, or spoke or was silent. It's a splendid relief from the overstrain and stimulus of the past few scholastic months. I go the day after tomorrow (Monday) with the Tweedies to New York, assist at Henrietta Temple's wedding on Tuesday, and then pass on to the Centennial for a couple of days. I suppose it will be pretty tiresome, but I want to see the English pictures, which they say are a good show.... I fancy my vacationizing will be confined to visits of a week at a time to different points, perhaps the pleasantest way after all of spending it. Newport as to its villas, and all that, is most repulsive to me. I really didn't know how little charm and how much shabbiness there was about the place. There are not more than three or four houses out of the whole lot that are not offensive, in some way, externally. But the mild nature grows on one every day. This afternoon, God willing, I shall spend on Paradise.[56]
The Tweedies keep no horses, which makes one walk more or pay more than one would wish. The younger Seabury told me yesterday that he was just reading your "Roderick Hudson," but offered no [comment]. Colonel Waring said of your "American" to me: "I'm not a blind admirer of H. James, Jr., but I said to my wife after reading that first number, 'By Jove, I think he's hit it this time!'" I think myself the thing opens very well indeed, you have a first-rate datum to work up, and I hope you'll do it well.
Your last few letters home have breathed a tone of contentment and domestication in Paris which was very agreeable to get.... Your accounts of Ivan Sergeitch are delightful, and I envy you the possession of the young painter's intimacy. Give my best love to Ivan. I read his book which you sent home (foreign books sent by mail pay duty now, though; so send none but good ones), and although the vein of "morbidness" was so pronounced in the stories, yet the mysterious depths which his plummet sounds atone for all. It is the amount of life which a man feels that makes you value his mind, and Turguenieff has a sense of worlds within worlds whose existence is unsuspected by the vulgar. It amuses me to recommend his books to people who mention them as they would the novels of Wilkie Collins. You say we don't notice "Daniel Deronda." I find it extremely interesting. Gwendolen and her spouse are masterpieces of conception and delineation. Her ideal figures are much vaguer and thinner. But her "sapience," as you excellently call it, passes all decent bounds. There is something essentially womanish in the irrepressible garrulity of her moral reflections. Why is it that it makes women feel so good to moralize? Man philosophizes as a matter of business, because he must,—he does it to a purpose and then lets it rest; but women don't seem to get over being tickled at the discovery that they have the faculty; hence the tedious iteration and restlessness of George Eliot's commentary on life. The La Farges are absent. Yours always,
W. J.
Under the title "Bain and Renouvier," James contributed a review containing a brief discussion of free will and determinism to the "Nation" of June 8, 1876. He of course sent a copy to Renouvier. The following letter begins with a reference to Renouvier's acknowledgment. James had been acquainted with Renouvier's work since 1868, when, as the reader will recall, he read a number of the "Année Philosophique," Renouvier's annual survey of contemporary philosophy, for the first time. The diary entry already quoted from the year 1870 has shown what effect Renouvier's essays then had on his mind. His admiration for the elder philosopher was great and he cherished it loyally for the rest of his life. Indeed, in the unfinished manuscript, which was published posthumously as "Some Problems of Philosophy," James looked back at the formative period of his own philosophical thinking and wrote: "Renouvier was one of the greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up." In time he made Renouvier's acquaintance in France and wrote to him often. He examined and discussed his writings with college classes. Occasionally he reported these discussions and read Renouvier's answers to the students. On the other side, Renouvier paid James the compliment of printing or translating several of his papers in the "Critique Philosophique," and thus brought him early to the notice of French readers.
To Charles Renouvier.
CAMBRIDGE, July 29, 1876.