CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 15, 1890.
My dear Mrs. Whitman,—It does me good to hear from you, and to come in contact with the spirit with which you "chuck" yourself at life. It is medicinal in a way which it would probably both surprise and please you to know, and helps to make me ashamed of those pusillanimities and self-contempts which are the bane of my temperament and against which I have to carry on my lifelong struggle. Enough! As for you, beat Sargent, play round Chamberlain, extract the goodness and wisdom of Bryce, absorb the autumn colors of the land and sea, mix the crimson and the opal fire in the glass, charm everyone you come in contact with by your humanity and amiability; in short, continue, and we shall have plenty to talk about at the next (but for that, tedious) dinner at which it may be my blessing to be placed by your side! Also enough!
You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart [Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am reading with great delight his book. How delicious is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut and dried heads of classification. Stanley is a genius all to himself, and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescribable mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and democratic feeling, callousness to others' insides, yet kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures.
As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You have a genius to cope with it.—But again, enough!
Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words you let fall about the "Psychology." Go on! But remember that you can do so just as well without reading it: I shan't know the difference. Seriously, your determination to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise noble nature. I wish that I had never written it.
I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid town.
Good-night! Yours faithfully,
WM. JAMES.
James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edition of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the next year as the "Briefer Course."
Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles,"[96] and had expressed a hope that such passages would be omitted from the Briefer Course.