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jay Chapman remarked, in his speaking and writing james created a
public "which came to see in him only the saint and the sage, which felt
only the religious truth which james was in search of, yet could never
quite grasp in his hand." Instead it "shone, as it were, straight through
his waistcoat, and distributed itself to everyone in the drawing room or
in the lecture hall where he sat."
james's position on the religious scene in America was complex. He
was sympathetic to the "utopian dreams of social justice" of his day
insofar as they represented secular forms of saintly charity. But the
social-gospel churches were more likely to be Episcopal than to be
revivalist, and the liberal theologians did not have his Methodist-like
feeling for twice-born ness. james saluted saintly forms of "non-resis–
tance" as prophets of a better future, but he was also hard-headedly
aware that "the whole history of constitutional government is a com–
mentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smit–
ten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also." His balance
has the risky charm of a circus performer holding a pole as he crosses a
wire high up in the tent.
He was faced with the challenge of performing another balancing act
(or what he called "beating and tacking") in his response to the ideal of
"the strenuous life," preached by Theodore Roosevelt and justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, who often used it to justify war and imperialism.
In
one sense james was himself an advocate of the strenuous ideal because
he was a believer in heroism as the moral significance of life. His famous
essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War" was a warning to his fellow
reformers that the martial virtues gave war a persistent and compelling
place in the human imagination, and some surrogate for them would
have to be found so as to "inflame the civic temper" as "past history has
inflamed the military temper."
james was outraged by the imperialism of the Republicans in the
Philippines and took to the newspapers to combat them, Governor
Theodore Roosevelt in particular. The Governor, he wrote, was "in the
Sturm und Drang
period of early adolescence, treats human affairs
when he makes speeches about them from the sole point of view of the
organic excitement and difficulty they may bring, gushes over war.. .for
the manly strenuousness it involves, and treats peace as a condition of
blubberlike and swollen ignobility fit only for huckstering weaklings,
dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life." You might
think that james sounded that way himself in his essay on "The Moral
Equivalent of War," but james pointed out the crucial difference. With
Roosevelt there was "not a word of the cause, one foe is as good as
