A word about the suggested reading. Very little of James is unrewarding, but these three books will give you a fair idea of both his personality and his ideas. The Principies of Psychology, though now partly superseded, remains James^ most permanent work. Difficult in part, it succeeds wonder- fully in dramatizing the life of the mind. James himself later spoke of its content as "this nasty little subject," but the world has not accepted his judgment. Pragmatism should be read not only because the word is so closely connected with James, but also because the idea behind the word is so closely connected with our character as a people. If you have read Mill [72] you may find it interesting to figure out why the book is dedicated to him. James^ most purely interesting book is The Varieties of Religious Experience. One of the cornerstones of the literature of religious psychology, it illustrates concretely what he meant by the pragmatic test.
The pragmatic test sounds simple and to many it is at once convincing. However, it is open to philosophical objections into which it is not our present business to go. Briefly, James argues that an ideas meaning and truth depend on its practical consequences. A problem is real if its solution makes a differ- ence in actual experience, if it performs an operation on our behavior. Thus James stresses not origins but results. In the Varieties he asserts that the religious states he is describing are, like ali states of mind, neurally conditioned. But he goes on to say that "their significance must be tested not by their origin but by the value of their fruits.,> Thus religion, whether or not determinably "true," is valuable to the individual and therefore to the race. Its truth is not absolute but functional. Ideas are good only as instruments, and it is by their instru- mentalism that we must judge them. To sum up, "an idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives." James^ moral ideais were of the highest and purest; "profitable" does not refer to the marketplace; nor is it fair to vulgarize James's pragmatism by saying that what he meant was "Anything is O.K. if it works."
There is more in James, far more, than the pragmatic idea, though it is central both to him and to our vague national phi- losophy, if we may be said to have one. One should understand it. But that is not the main reason for reading him. The main reason is the man himself. He is one of the most attractive
figures in the history of thought—vital, alert to the whole world of experience, mentally liberating, emotionally refresh- ing. In addition he is master of a style of great freshness and clarity. One may disagree with the pragmatic test (believers in fixed religious and moral values are bound to do so) and still emerge from reading James feeling more alive and hopeful than before. He is the philosopher of possibility. By his own pragmatic test, he is apt to succeed with the reader. Reading him can make a difference.
C.F.
96
HENRY JAMES
1843-1916 The Ambassadors
During his seventy-two years, nothing much happened to Henry James, brother of the great American philosopher-psy- chologist William James [95]. He never married. Indeed, so far as we know, he had few passionate relations with men or women. (He had a close, but entirely chaste, friendship with Edith Wharton [102].) The one decisive externai event of his long, industrious life was his decision in 1876 to live perma- nently in England. There, varying his desk labors with trips to his native country and the European continent, plus much din- ing out, James spent the rest of his days.
It seems a bit passive. Yet on balance James probably lived one of the most active lives of the century. Nothing happened to him except everything—everything he could observe, feel, discriminate, ponder, and finally cast into his elaborately wrought stories. He made everything pay artistic dividends. His books are his real biography.
Conrad [100] called him "the historian of fine consciences," an excellent phrase if we extend the last word so as to include the idea of consciousness. James excels in the careful tracing of
subtle relationships among subtle characters. He exhausts ali the psychological possibilities of any given situation; and the situations he chooses, at least in his major novйis, are dense with meaning. His mastery flows in part from his perfect recognition of his own immense powers. These depend on sen- sibility and high intelligence, and the ability to find and mold the exactly right form for his ideas and themes. As pure artist he is the most extraordinary figure in the history of the American novel.
James himself thought The Ambassadors his finest book. Though written in his late period it does not suffer from the overelaboration of which many readers complain. (One well- known witticism of Philip Guedallas thus describes James's three phases: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.) Ali his powers are here held in beautiful balance and suspension. He handles one of his major themes—the impact of Continental moral realism on the rigid and sometimes naive ethical outlook of Americans—on the levei of the highest comedy. That last word should not make you think The Ambassadors is not a serious work. For ali its grace and wit, it is weighty enough, with its grave and reiterated plea for more life, for more perception, for the claims of the intelligence as an instrument for seizing and interpreting experience. "Live ali you can," cries Lambert Strether to Little Bilham, "live, live!" In Strether, who is superbly equipped to react to the new experience that comes to him, alas too late, I think James felt he had created a peculiarly American type.
As with most of James^ work, The Ambassadors must be read slowly. Every line tells. Ali is measured for its possible effect. There is no trace in it of what the author called "the baseness of the arbitrary stroke." It may take you ten times as long to read The Ambassadors as to read Tom Jones [55]—but for some readers there will be ten times as much in it.
One of the most voluminous of great writers, James cannot be known through any single book. He worked brilliantly in the fields of the novel, the long and short story, the memoir, the biography, the criticai essay, and the travei sketch, as well as, unsuccessfully, in the theater. In addition to The Ambassadors, I should like to nominate for your attention two other works of Jamesian fiction: The Portrait of A Lady and The Turn of the Screw.
C.F.
97
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
1844-1900
Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morais, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works
The rhapsodic singer of the strong, triumphant, joyful super- man led a life of failure, loneliness, obscurity, and physical pain. Son of a Lutheran pastor in Saxony, he was brought up by pious female relatives. A brilliant student, he specialized in classical philosophy. At twenty-five he was professor of Greek at Basel University. He resigned ten years later, in 1879, because of poor health. One of the major influences in his life at this time was Wagner, whom he at first adored. (Bertrand Russell remarks: "Nietzsche^ superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek.,>) Gradually, however, as Wagner succumbed to philistinism, anti-Semitism, German racism, and the sick religiosity of Parsifal, Nietzsche drew away from the great composer, and at last broke with him. From 1879 to 1888 he wandered about Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living a lonely life in seedy boardinghouses. Yet during these nine years, working under the most depressing conditions, he pro- duced most of his famous books. In December of 1888 he was found in a Turin street, weeping and embracing a horse. His mind had given way. For the remaining eleven years of his life he was insane, possibly—there is no proof—as a result of general syphilitic paresis.