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BY HENRY JAMES

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER




NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER

[Illustration: _Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about
1866_]




NOTES OF A
SON AND BROTHER

BY

HENRY JAMES

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published March, 1914




ILLUSTRATIONS


Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about
1866        _Frontispiece_

FACING
PAGE

Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James
(page 18)        18

Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861        96

A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129        130

Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault
on Fort Wagner        244

"The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for melancholia."--From
a letter of William James (page 447)       448




I


It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of
current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere[1] so
unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad
in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss
schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty
distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on,
when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents
began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hotel de l'Ecu, which now
erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone--its
only rival then was the Hotel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger
and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of
Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a
singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was
less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position we
lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly
congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of
those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two
younger brothers had, in general, on that day their _sortie_ from the
Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then
established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present
enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier
recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation,
during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period
drew itself out, of those _courses_, along the lake and along the hills,
which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest
country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed
too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself--this an
effect, as I remember feeling it, of my considerably greater servitude.
I had been placed, separately, at still another Institution, that of M.
Rochette, who carried on an Ecole Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, by
which was meant in particular the Polytechnic School at Zurich, with
whatever other like curricula, always "scientific," might elsewhere be
aimed at; and I had been so disposed of under a flattering misconception
of my aptitudes that leaves me to-day even more wonderstruck than at
that immediate season of my distress.

I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical
operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank--the dire
discipline of the years bringing no relief whatever to my state; and
mathematics unmitigated were at the Institution Rochette the air we
breathed, building us up as they most officiously did for those other
grim ordeals and pursuits, those of the mining and the civil engineer,
those of the architectural aspirant and the technician in still other
fields, to which we were supposed to be addressed. Nothing of the sort
was indeed supposed of me--which is in particular my present
mystification; so that my assault of the preliminaries disclosed, feeble
as it strikingly remained, was mere darkness, waste and anguish. I found