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Together the boys suffered a bevy of "educative ladies," who viewed them "as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life" on which "to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling." At home their mother warmed them with love, while their father taught them to sit in the cold draft of a wide-open mind without catching intellectual sniffles. One of twelve heirs to a $3,000,000 real-estate and utilities fortune (second only to John Jacob Astor's in the New York of that day), Henry Sr. had the means to practice what he preached. His lack of a fixed occupation rather embarrassed his young sons. Beset by a boy who said that his father was a stevedore, Henry Jr. implored Henry Sr.: "What shall we tell them you are?" Replied his father: "Say I'm a philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind . . . or, best of all, just say I'm a student."
Spray of Ideas. When the boys raised the question of religion, Henry Sr., himself a disciple of Emanuel Swedenborg,* gave them some more prickly answers: "I recall, to hear our father reply that we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom . . . even that of the Catholics, even that of the Jews." To "ignore them all equally," wrote James, "was what we mainly did." The boys continually felt the vigorous spray of what their mother called "your father's ideas." The family friend Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to this spray as "elegant Billingsgate."
Social and intellectual restlessness made Henry Sr. cart self and family off to Europe for a five-year stay in 1855. Henry was only twelve, but he felt his first twinge of vocation: "One way of taking life was to go in for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied just with the sense and the image of it all, and only a fifth of the actual immersion." It was a way of life, and a literary method, which he was to use and abuse, i.e., that "impressions are experience." As "gaping pilgrims," the Jameses grand-toured Europe. The discovery that the height of New York fashion could be ludicrous in Europe was the kind of acorn from which James's mighty oaklike theme—American innocence and artlessness v. European decadence and cultural splendor—was later to grow.
After the outbreak of the Civil War, Henry suffered an obscure back injury. Younger brothers Bob and Wilky went off to war and officered with distinction. Henry was reduced to cultivating his "desperate receptivity" and "seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off." Just "to be vague about something," the 19-year-old Henry entered Harvard Law School, but never practiced. He consoled himself with the thought that everything he soaked up "would matter somehow" somewhere, sometime.