The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 · William James
W.J.
MY DEAR MISS GRACE, or rather, let me say, MY DEAR GRACE,--since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,[100] see us go off and not raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn duty _I_ can have in what remains to me of life will be to save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education, nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one room--to combine these things (I say) with a _holiday_ for _oneself_ is an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum.
The wear and tear of a professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?--there is the hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years and _on the whole does not dislike it_ (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous houses either way, and others beside _them_. Yet on that iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village. _Things_ are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are performed, punishments take place--recriminations, arguments, execrations--with a publicity after which, if there _were_ reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its place when _we_ are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we may get used to this as other travelers do--only Arthur and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away!
Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given us for that. Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days at a _pension_ on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we had not made before--I mean the family of Joseph Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.