Читать книгу The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 - William James - Страница 28

CAMBRIDGE, June 5, 1897.

Dear H.,—Alice wrote you (I think) a brief word after the crisis of last Monday. It took it out of me nervously a good deal, for it came at the end of the month of May, when I am always fagged to death; and for a week previous I had almost lost my voice with hoarseness. At nine o'clock the night before I ran in to a laryngologist in Boston, who sprayed and cauterized and otherwise tuned up my throat, giving me pellets to suck all the morning. By a sort of miracle I spoke for three-quarters of an hour without becoming perceptibly hoarse. But it is a curious kind of physical effort to fill a hall as large as Boston Music Hall, unless you are trained to the work. You have to shout and bellow, and you seem to yourself wholly unnatural. The day was an extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the tail end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and modest man. The weather was cool and the skies were weeping, but not enough to cause any serious discomfort. They simply formed a harmonious background to the pathetic sentiment that reigned over the day. It was very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since—the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself,—"the tender grace of a day that is dead,"—etc. We shall never have anything like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finest things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.] Washington's speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.

As for myself, I will never accept such a job again. It is entirely outside of my legitimate line of business, although my speech seems to have been a great success, if I can judge by the encomiums which are pouring in upon me on every hand. I brought in some mugwumpery at the end, but it was very difficult to manage it.... Always affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

Letters to Ellen and Rosina Emmet, which now enter the series, will be the better understood for a word of reminder. "Elly" Temple, one of the Newport cousins referred to in the very first letters, had married, and gone with her husband, Temple Emmet, to California. But in 1887, after his death, she had returned to the East to place her daughters in a Cambridge school. In 1895 and 1896 Ellen and Rosina had made several visits to the house in Irving Street; and thus the comradely cousinship of the sixties had been maintained and reëstablished with the younger generation. At the date now reached, Ellen, or "Bay" as she was usually called, was studying painting. She and Rosina had been in Paris during the preceding winter. Now they and their mother were spending the summer on the south coast of England, at Iden, quite close to Rye, where Henry James was already becoming established.