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life, that education "would have deprived [her] surely of those
exquisite moments of mental flatulence which every now and then
inflate the cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibili–
ties - of stretching oneself to cosmic limits, and who would ever give
up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?"
An Emersonian transcendental note which her father would
have approved is qualified here by the world "flatulence," which
testifies to her understanding of the body's demeaning reminders to
the spirit-of which illness was a lifelong demonstration. Unlike her
father, Alice maintained, by illness itself, contact with "relative
knowledge" of the facts of life . And though she was a shut-in , she
paid attention to the street outside, read newspapers, took an
interest in politics. When she lived near her brother Henry in
England, her radical viewpoints stimulated his own attention to
social undercurrents and probably influenced the writing of his most
political novel,
The Princess Casamassima,
in which she may be por–
trayed as Rosy Muniment. She was an ardent partisan of Irish home
rule. William James once remarked that Henry was a member of the
James family and of no other country, but for Alice connections
threaded even from her sickroom into society at large. Henry felt
that she, at least, had a nation outside the family- she alone of the
J
ameses recovered their ancestral Irishness.
Yet it was her father, as well as the younger Henry, who proba–
bly gave her a formula for "converting" - a favorite word of the elder
Henry James - her defeat into triumph. Her father was himself a
complex man. He had been a lively boy who had been crippled by a
childhood accident, a member of a generation of Americans who had
inherited income from their fortune-building forbears and had no
need to exert themselves to make money. Looking about him in a
period when the nation was giving itself more and more completely
to vulgar material "progress, " he felt justified in urging upon his
children the superior cultivation of pure being. To be fine, to
be
with
a pure, gemlike flame, was after all better than to
do .
Life did not
demand that he should change his personal formula, but the Civil
War arrived in time to pose the question of doing versus being to his
five children. When young men of all classes felt the compulsion to
engage themselves, only his two younger sons volunteered to serve
in the Union Army. They were injured in the field and suffered in
health , consequently, for the rest of their lives. His elder sons did not
enlist, perhaps because of physical disability, perhaps because they
had absorbed from their father a negative valuation of action. Yet
