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In our time we are losing respect for ordinate authority. We expect the philosopher and other leaders of thought to make good. James called upon himself and his colleagues to give an account of themselves not only as professors, but as men. "Humbug is humbug," he says, "even though it bear the scientific name. That confession is one that the common citizen has been demanding for a long time. We are suspicious of what James calls "the common herd of philosophic scribes." It was time we had a professor whose pages should glow with sincerity; it was high time, especially in New England universities, that the grand lamas of learning should be made to realize that they live in our world, that they cannot withdraw to the lofty remoteness of Thibet, however much they may prefer the climate. We are beginning to count the cost of the inefficient church and the inefficient university. We are trying to clear our shoddy and cotton skirts (which inefficient statesmanship sells to us at all-wool prices) from the briars of bewilderment; we are striving to find a way out to things that matter, to make our lives and schools and governments better. In this struggle James was a liberator. He justified his academic tribe. As he jokingly says, he tried to earn his salary as a full professor. He was impatient with the nonsense of his class because he had sympathy for other classes. He did not try to allay, but vigorously stirred the ferment of rebellion which is boiling over the walls of institutionalism in all parts of the world.

Mark Twain has been mentioned in this chapter, partly for the pleasure of imagining the shock which the association

of the two men might give to critical souls, but chiefly because the association is just. They are the two splendid figures in the pitifully small number of American humanists of their generation. They both had heart and humour and eloquence and humanity.*

It is usual to speak of Mark Twain as a "philosopher" in the popular sense of the word. Professional philosophers ignore that sense. But James did not ignore it; he valued it and bade his colleagues relate their philosophies to popular meanings, to the experiences of common humanity. Our universities cannot be wholly useless when a college professor, a lecturer upon abstruse problems, can write as James wrote in 1899 in the preface of his "Talks to Teachers":

"The practical consequence of such a philosophy (the belief that the facts and worth of life need many cognizers to take them in) is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality - is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the

*It may not be indiscreet to give in a footnote an example of James's wholesouled manner of recognizing contemporary idealisms, of his readiness to throw scholarly apparatus overboard and go straight to essential truth. There has been much psychological, and much pseudo-psychological, discussion of Miss Helen Keller. Professor James wrote to her in praise of one of her books. After some lively compliments about her "psychology" and her literary gifts, he said: "The sum of it is that you're a blessing, and I'll kill any one that says you're not!" Lest the reader far from Boston may take this for granted and say, "Of course; she was at Radcliffe, he was a Harvard professor, and Harvard professors must necessarily have been enthusiastic about this wonderful student I may add that in this James seems to be as much an exception to the temper of official Cambridge as he was an exception in many other significant things.

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pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

William James was born in New York City, January 11, 1842. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 26, 1910. His father was Henry James, the Swedenborgian writer. Mr. Henry James, the novelist, is his brother. He studied at the Lawrence Scientific School and graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1869. He taught at Harvard from 1872 to 1907, as instructor in physiology and anatomy, then as professor of philosophy and psychology. He gave the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh 1899-1911, and the Hibbert lectures at Oxford in 1908. In 1878 he married Alice H. Gibbens.

His works are: Principles of Psychology, 1890; Psychology-Briefer Course, 1892; The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897; Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Life's Ideals, 1898; Human Immortality-Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, 1899; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902; Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907; A Pluralistic Universe, 1908; The Meaning of Truth, 1909; Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911; Memories and Studies, 1911; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912.

CHAPTER XVI

LANIER

And

THREE volumes of unimpeachable poetry have been written in America: "Leaves of Grass," the thin volume of Poe, and the poetry of Sidney Lanier. It is treading on treacherous negatives to say that there is not a fourth fit for their society; yet I believe that to make an adequate fourth one would have to assemble in an anthology the finest poems from lesser lyrists, beginning, perhaps, with Bryant's "Water Fowl" and including, if not ending with, the remarkable poem published only last year, "The Singing Man," by Josephine Preston Peabody (Mrs. Marks). a beautiful book that anthology would be, for it would contain Freneau's "Wild Honey Suckle," Parson's "On a Bust of Dante," and "Dirge for One Who Fell in Battle," Timrod's "Cotton Boll," Stedman's "John Brown" and "Helen Keller," Aldrich's "Fredericksburg" and "Identity," Sill's "The Fool's Prayer," Gilder's sonnet "On the Life Mask of Lincoln," a score of marvellous little poems by Father Tabb, James Whitcomb Riley's "South Wind and the Sun," Emma Lazarus's "Venus of the Louvre," L. F. Tooker's "The Last Fight," a dozen lyrics of Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody's "Gloucester Moors," four or five poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and some other verse drawn

from the younger rather than the elder poets. Surely it would be a fragrant cluster from many gardens whose beauty is a splendid and consoling denial that the race of singers is dead or shall ever die till man dies. If this anthology, made of poets who are somewhat invidiously and with wavering justice of phrase called minor, were ranked on our shelves with the complete works of American poets, what single light could shine undiminished by the rivalry of the chosen cluster of perfection? Not Longfellow, nor Whittier, nor Holmes, nor Lowell, but only these three man, Lanier.

Poe, Whit

Lanier was a poet, always, continuously, even in his juvenile verses, and his genius was unerringly self-recognized before the bitter exigencies of his life permitted him to announce himself and to prove his modestly proud conviction. No poet's lot, except Poe's, ever fell in ruggeder places; no poet, except Poe, was so alone and self-directed. A letter written when he was thirty-three to Bayard Taylor sets forth the aridity of his life. "I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine my life has been as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relation with men of letters, with travellers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."

To his father he writes: "My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through