THE house of James promises to be better known in literary history than any other American family of our day. It has produced three men of letters remarkable for their energy and originality, all dowered with that quality of personal force which will not permit itself to be passed by. The father, Henry I, was a philosopher little regarded in his own day, who developed what was rudely called 'a sort of Ishmaelitish Swedenborgianism,' by no means to be easily apprehended. He was the contemporary of Longfellow and Holmes and Motley, but by the side of their fame he walked in a cloud, almost unobserved. His views were expressed in admirable English, but they were difficult of interpretation and it used to be said that the only people who understood them were his two sons.

Being inquisitive in such matters, I once pressed Henry II, to explain them to me briefly, but he admitted that he could not. 'William, and only William, can be father's interpreter!' But when Henry I died, in 1882, his posthumous fame began, for William published his Literary Remains, and trumpeted, with no uncertain sound, the claim of Henry I to be considered one of the most acute metaphysicians that America had produced. He was also one of the most surprising, and a portent to the New England conventions. It is recorded that he once 'attacked morality' in the house of Emerson, whose sister, aged eightyfour, and wearing her shroud under

her dress, rose in rebuke and shook him by the shoulders.

This eccentric and valuable man had five children, two of whom were endowed with genius. It seems hardly fair on the millions of American citizens that, among the half dozen leading men of letters of a generation, two should be brothers, but so it was. Indeed, among the serious writers of their time, the only name which could be mentioned in competition with those of William and Henry II James was that of W. D. Howells.

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Delightful, vivacious, sensitive to the last degree, this trio illuminated the America of their age, and, having passed away, still speak to us. Howells, no monument has yet been unveiled, but the brothers are more and more prominently celebrated, and now Henry III comes forward, bearing two massive volumes of letters written by his father, the psychologist, with a biographical setting of his own so tactfully written and so competently arranged, that we perceive in it fair evidence of a dynastic talent.

While we read these volumes, we ought to have open at our side that somewhat nebulous masterpiece, A Small Boy and Others, in which Henry II revived his memories of sixty years before, seen through a golden haze of retrospect. With all this literature in our hands, we may repeat of the brothers, if we please, the old amiable gibe that the one wrote fiction like metaphysics, and the other metaphysics like fiction. Whatever it was,

William James was born in 1842. For anecdotes of his boyhood we are referred to his brother's memories, and the Letters do not open till 1861, when he gave up the ambition to become a painter, which had hitherto inspired him, and abruptly turned to chemistry. Later, his growing curiosity about science developed into a determination to train for the medical profession.

During these early years his mind, as revealed in the Letters, displays no consistent bias, but an impetuous curiosity directed, spasmodically, to all manner of subjects. He seems to dart about in the pursuit of knowledge without an aim, like a frightened fish in a glass jar, anxious to escape from some unrealized restraint. No doubt, all this restlessness prepared his intellect for its final direction. It was not until 1865, when, being in Brazil on a futile zoological expedition, he suddenly wrote home, 'I'm going to study philosophy all my days,' and tore back from the Amazon to work on psychology at Harvard.

He could not, however, get free at once from his physical science, and in 1872 we find him still teaching physiology, although he was secretly setting his face on the ultimate horizon. He still suffered from a sense of mental inexperience, and from what he called a 'philosophical hypochondria.' It is not until 1877 that we see him transferred to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, and beginning to give lectures under the title of 'Psychology.'

Now, in his thirty-sixth year, his violent and vagabond mind is discovered flowing along a channel at last, and for the rest of his life runs in it, never, indeed, steadily, but at least exclusively. He had long perceived that he had 'many of the elements of a Pascal' in him, and now his intellectual career, so tossed and flung about by a

measure of equilibrium, and had become reconciled to life and to itself. Yet, it was perhaps rather Descartes than Pascal whom the excitable and light-hearted William James resembled.

He now remarked that the teaching of philosophy had been neglected in the United States, where it was generally left in the safe hands of a minister of religion, who 'edified rather than awakened' his pupils. The modern masters of European thought were ignored, and when Schopenhauer was mentioned by a student, the professor would gently lead back such a lamb to the fold of Butler's 'Analogy.' William James now, in 1878, entered into a very fortunate and happy marriage, and while he was spending his honeymoon in a romantic glen of the Adirondacks he began to write a Manual.

This book occupied him for the next twelve years, and appeared at last as the famous Principles of Psychology. Of its inception, development, and completion, the Letters give a record of sustained and, almost, of romantic interest. Meanwhile, William James was lecturing with ever-increasing audacity, rousing the sect of the Hegelians by his chaff of 'their sacerdotal airs and their sterility,' corresponding with Remouvier, exciting himself by a visit to the Prague philosophers, and forming a friendship with the only other American metaphysician, Josiah Royce, of California.

All was prepared for success, but nothing was expected that could approach the overwhelming popularity of the Psychology, when it was published in 1890. It was read by everybody, and became the subject of discussion at every Transatlantic' tea-squall.' The unique training of William James, his admirably pure and vivid English, and his daring rejection of all the mysteries and shibboleths of the

metaphysicians combined to ensure him an almost dangerous welcome from the public.

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There now followed a period of high prosperity and effectiveness, marked by the publication of The Will to Believe, in 1897, which widened the circle of his admirers, a class from which none but professional philosophers now absented themselves. The piety of his son does not conceal the fact, which William James's own letters abundantly reveal, that he never completely ingratiated the men of his own profession. Philosophers must decide among themselves what were technical causes of this divergence; but William James's energetic individualism was quite enough to account for it. He mocked his own follower Josiah Royce, he repudiated his own master Renouvier, not with the slightest bitterness, but in a tumult of democratical high spirits, his arm wound round the victim's shoulder all the while, and talking at the top of his voice. He could not endure the traditional attitude, the sacerdotal apparatus; he brought his metaphysic out into the street, and stripped it of its mystery. He was constantly revising his own opinions and changing his own mind, 'but it was only the elastic and transient bowing of the reed before the gale.' He was moderate and balanced in nothing, and he scorned a mediocrity of affection. If a book, or a person, or an opinion suddenly pleased him, he welcomed it with 'whoops of blessing,' and, on the other hand, disapproval took the form of an inarticulate cry of disgust.

All this fascinated his classes and his public, but was ill-fitted to conciliate graver colleagues, especially in Europe. To a recommendation we find him replying, 'Damn your imperfect geniuses!' But Bergson came across his path in 1902, and William James

clasped to his bosom, at length, one brother of exquisite genius.'

All William James's life rang like a peal of wedding bells, until one summer, when his indomitable high spirits led him, already exhausted by his work, to take part in a mad expedition over the Adirondacks, involving, besides a night out in the woods, an amount of climbing of spurs and peaks beyond the endurance of a studious man of fifty-six. The result was a valvular lesion of the heart, the insidious progress of which no treatment at Nauheim or retirement at Rye could stem. But William James would not give way; he delivered his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, he published his Pragmatism, which enjoyed the success of a popular romance; yet, with all his energy and determination he was a doomed man. In 1907 he had to resign all his duties at Harvard, but the old vitality flashed up again in the addresses on 'A Pluralistic Universe,' which he delivered at Oxford the next year. He died at Chocorua, in New Hampshire, on August 26, 1910. This man determined both to live and know, and his record is a portent of violent intellectual beneficence.

It is natural to contrast the philosopher with his no less eminent, and to us, more familiarly known, brother Henry. This may be done abundantly and instructively in the published correspondence of the pair. William had none of Henry's absorbing passion for Europe, and his first greetings on stepping out of the steamer train were, My! how cramped and inferior England seems! America may be raw and shrill, but I could never live with this as you do!' The indignation which these blasphemies awakened in Henry is divertingly described by his nephew:

Horror and consternation are weak terms by which to describe his [Henry James's] feelings; and nothing but a devotion seldom existing be

tween brothers, and a lively interest in the astonishing phenomenon of such a reaction, ever carried him through the hour. He usually ended by hurrying William onward - anywhere within the day if possible — and remained alone to ejaculate, to exclaim, and to expatiate, for weeks, on the rude and exciting cyclone that had burst upon him, and passed by.

At the beginning of the late war, Henry James exclaimed to a pair of his London friends, 'However English you may be, know that I am still more intensely English!' William James is revealed to us as no less intensely American, yet, there is nothing in his humorous outbursts which can stir a feather in our own national susceptibility.

[The Manchester Guardian] WINTER FISHING

BY W. H. H.

THE wind swooped down out of the frozen fastnesses of the North and raced across the night, fretting the tips of the swelling seas into lustreless white ridges against the blackness. The stiffened canvas of the little smack boomed and groaned beneath the onslaught, with the reef points beating a mad tattoo, and the weather halyards whined and crackled under the strain.

She rose and fell to the ill-tempered tumble of water with the loggy motion of a trawler with her gear down, and the deck-hand, in solitary watch, with his head bent to the squall, hugged the shelter of the mizzen mast, the lashed tiller hunched up under his hip.

Right away to windward, a tiny point of light told of the presence of other toilers taking their harvest, and the deckie watched stolidly; it gave him a sense of companionship on that lonely deck. But, as he watched it rise and fall, there broke out a sudden flare of light below it, a long flame that split the darkness and showed the silhouetted figures of moving men. The deckie

grunted to himself, and, shaking the sleet from the windward side of his oilskins, dropped silently down the hoodway of the little cabin.

Just inside, on the bottom locker, lay curled up the little skipper, dressed even to his oilies, and the deckie shook him by the shoulder.

'Just on dawn, skipper,' he whispered, 'an' the Dutchie to win'ard is haulin'.'

The little man was awake in an instant, every sense alert. In a couple of seconds he had followed the deckie to the deck, noting the steam pressure of the winch on the way. A few moments later, his towsled head was thrust through the cabin top.

'B'low there, turn out to haul-l!' he bawled.

There was a momentary hesitation, and then the bunkslides shot back; into the light of the cabin poked three pairs of stockinged legs followed by their grimy owners, who, yawning and swaying, groped sleepily round for their thigh-boots and mitts, and, after taking toll of the hospitable tea kettle on the cabin stove, struggled into their brinestiffened oilskins and followed each other to the cold, wet deck above.

A brilliant oil lamp shot its glare along the slushy deck, while the stumpy funnel of the steam capstan was roaring out half a foot of flame and a stream of soot and smoke, that eddied and swirled down to leeward.

The smack had come round in the wind, and the big boom swung heavily over; the skipper and deckie, taking advantage of the slack in the trawl warp, the heavy hempen cable that tows the gear along the ocean bottom, had transferred it from the tow-post amidships to the steam winch.

'Stopped to curl yer hair?' inquired the little man, sarcastically, as the hands rose out of the hoodway. 'Bet

ter get a move on; it'll keep you warm.' The deckie chuckled and buffeted his body into warmth, the icicles clinging from his mitts as he swung his arms." 'Cold enough to freeze the scales off'n a dogfish, all the watch,' he volunteered. And no one contradicted him. Then the winch rattled into action, and inboard, out of the depths overside, came the sinuous, dripping warp. With his mitts pulled well over his hands, the third hand paid it into the hold forward, and as the little smack dropped down the long valleys, her low deck occasionally caught a tumbling rush of icy water that tickled that luckless third hand into spurts of profanity. The others laughed uproariously.

For a minute or so, the winch merrily rattled on until, all at once, like some prehistoric monster of the deep, the gaunt trawl-beam, with the wroughtiron hoops at each end, rose out of the sea and went towering upwards to the obscurity of the yards. A hastily-lit flare showed up the streaming meshes of the net that hung to it, as the whole gear was carefully lowered flush with the ice-crowned gunnel.

The skipper called a rest, and the crew warmed their rime-caked hands, already aflame with chilblains and salt water sores, by the glowing winch funnel, while the boy dodged below for mugs of the inevitable tea. They wiped the sleet from their faces and swallowed the scalding stuff in gulps; then the skipper bullied them into action again as he looked around at the sky.

'Come on, we'll be gettin' along,' he said; there's heaps t' do, an' more squalls a comin'.'

In one long line, they hung over the slippery gunnel, clawing up the net that hung in the water below, by their fingers in the meshes. With a united swing, to the grunt of the skipper, they hauled it slowly in, to pile up glistening inboard.

In a moment or two, the apex of the net came into view, a whitey-gray mass on the surface of the water; but it was too heavy to haul in by hand, so they rested again while a block and tackle was rigged up to the yard. The block was frozen, but it was soon kicked into action, and, to the racket of the winch, the night's catch slowly swept up out of the sea and swung round over the deck.

'What did I say?' shouted the skipper; 'look at it! thirty trunks if a skipfull. Winter fish'n's barb'rous - but 'tis fish'n.'

The deckhand slid underneath the streaming bag of fish that hung a foot or two above the deck, and slacked away the rope that held the mouth of the net fast. With a rush and a splatter, the harvest of twelve hours' trawling dropped down on the slippery deck; rocks and weed; great turbot and tiny haddock; shell-fish, sea-shells, and rusted wreckage; brill, skate, cod, and ling;- all went sliding down under the lee rail in an apparently inextricable mass. They lit another flare and waded in to sort it out. Wet and cold, they wasted no time. Overboard went the rocks and weed, small fry and undesirable fish generally, while the rest were quickly sorted into skips for cleaning.

In a little while, the deck was comparatively clear and the gear 'shot' again. The mate went below to warm up on a mess of meat, peas, and duff, preparatory to taking up the morning watch, while the others prepared the catch for packing in the fishroom.

The little skipper took his morning pipe in the shelter of the hoodway, and watched Sammy pack half a dozen huge turbot, carefully, in a fish trunk.

'A dozen lots like that, Sammy,' he said, 'an' ye'll feel a difference in your share, eh? Prime's the stuff for profit -an' winter fish'n for prime fish.'