Henry James (1843-1916)
&
William James (1842-1910)


    They both were important influences for John Cowper, but it is possible to think that William was perhaps more important in the development of his philosophical ideas than Henry ever was as concerns his craft as a writer.
The recondite art, sublime in its devoted remoteness from the vulgar, of Henry James, never seemed to reach the bookshops at all! I recollect searching steadily once, in the first decade of the present century, and this, you must remember, was after the publication of The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, through every single bookshop of the city of Baltimore, and all in vain. The finest quintessence of Henry James's genius appeared, I always think, in what you might call his middle style, that is in the five years before 1900 and in the five years after that date; but if these volumes were not to be found in Baltimore, they were hardly likely to be picked up in Omaha, or Iowa City, or Denver, or Fargo, or Needles, or Joplin, or San Antonio. (Autobiography)
We must keep in mind what he is pleased to admit:
My Protean nature, so singularly fluid, seemed able to wind itself, like a vaporous serpent, through the intrecacies of any philosophy that was bold enough to recreate the malleable world for me. (Autobiography).
And he later adds:
But William James was a startling delight to me too, for all his roguish jibes at Hegel. I responded with a lively Cymric reciprocity to his Pluralistic ideas, which, in my fluid and incorrigibly sceptical mind, seemed quite as conceivable a vision of things as any self-evolving, self-dividing, self-reconciling absolute. I can recall one occasion, when I was heading for Trenton where I was to give a lecture, being so absorbed in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience that I permitted my train to stop at the station and to leave the station in complete oblivion of my purpose. (Autobiography)