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THE
MIDDLE YEARS

BY
HENRY JAMES

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published November, 1917

[Illustration: From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry

Henry James]


BY HENRY JAMES

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER

THE MIDDLE YEARS

NOTES ON NOVELISTS
WITH SOME OTHER NOTES




EDITOR'S NOTE


_The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of a
volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name
of one of his own short stories_, The Middle Years. _It was designed to
follow on_ Notes of a Son and Brother _and to extend to about the same
length. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of
1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and
were not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have been
corrected and the marking of the paragraphs--which he usually deferred
till the final revision--has been completed._

_In dictating_ The Middle Years _he used no notes, and beyond an
allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication
of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it
was intended to cover_.

_PERCY LUBBOCK._




I


If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[1] that an
event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is
moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis.
Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth--so
shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to
many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily
to be young, for _all_ life at the same time: youth is an army, the
whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and
our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's
country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it
throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers
ahead--stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body,
and even in many a case never catch up at all. Or under another figure
it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of
the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as
something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains
either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between
the leaves. A volume, and a most substantial, _had_ felt its pages very
gravely pressed together before the winter's end that I have spoken of,
but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I gather from
memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated--a year seen by me
now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know
how endearingly enough to name them!) which I should call fairly
infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not
still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend
themselves to estimation.

[1] "Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914.

It was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever
inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain
particular points and on lines corresponding with them, than I found
myself, from the first day of March 1869, in the face of an opportunity
that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting,
the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a
somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth
year. Treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the
remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities,
positively and ideally intact, I now recognise--I in fact long ago
recognised--on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism;
which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss
about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere
impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and
imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and
houses or flocks and herds. It is to the account of that immense
fantastication that I set down a state of mind so out of proportion to
anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of
foolish-looking gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say
whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of
innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. I like to recover this
really