_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 prodigious flush--as my reader, clearly, must perceive I do; I
like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous
March day--which I have glanced at too, I believe, on some other and
less separated page than this--for the sake of the extraordinary gage of
experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that I had but to
take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as I now treat
myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that
act. I took up the gage, and as I look back the fullest as well as
simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that I
have never, in common honour, let it drop again. And the small hour was
just that of my having landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy,
overwhelmingly English morning and pursued, with immediate intensities
of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment for fear of
almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late
breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi Hotel ("Radley's," as I
had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me
over without a scruple to my fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to
appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great
beheld sum of things, I regard in other words as having settled upon me
once for all while I observed for instance that in England the plate of
buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after
hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that
circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. I must have had with
my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it
was from a far other store of condiments I most liberally helped myself.
I was lucidly aware of so gorging--esoterically, as it were, while I
drew out the gustatory process; and I must have said in that lost
reference to this scene of my dedication which I mentioned above that I
was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of
the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep,
black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British
"sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than
the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded
and refolded "Times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter,
truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray,
positively to Smollett, and to Hogarth, to every connection that could
help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things
hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a
revelation.
To what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one
could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as
stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of
suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew
where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of life,
and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be
indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise.
Recognition, I dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the
months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the
already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated
and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined
and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the
double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down
the middle of which I should inconceivably pass--inconceivably save for
being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and
response, at every step. Obviously half the charm, as I can but thinly
describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first
passages of which I thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by
it as I was, and having so to deal with it--in the anticipatory way or
to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should find
it in order--I yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling
or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from
impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of
understanding and that really wherever I looked, and still more wherever
I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. This in particular was of the
perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was
immense the embarrassment of it was nil--as if the getting into relation
with the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of
divine economy now fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the total
fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that I knew what everything
meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know
less only with increase of knowledge. That must indeed have been of the
essence of the general effect and the particular felicity--only not
grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a
consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a
preoccupied and animated circle and yet so miraculously aware of the
matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining
in. To say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be
feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate,
probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents,
mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal
impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. The feast, as it
more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned
so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so
far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone.
To return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the
first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push
in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising
ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the
quickening process. The trouble is that with these sacred spots, to
later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle,
and that one's account of them has to shake them together fairly hard,
making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each.
In speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of Europe, if I may
give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted
gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench
myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and
branching arms, that catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such a matter
as my recovery of contact with London for a few weeks, the contact
broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me
that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it
altogether. I stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading
reminder that just those days began a business for me that was to go
ever so much further than I then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by
my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish--the harvest of which,
I almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. I
foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, throughout these
Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual _vivid_ image
of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms
of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in
relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the
wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to
us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone
makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an
argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and
gaps without them. Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the
downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the _apparent_
transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of
things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't
after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation,
for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds,
smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses.
What began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of
dusky ground-floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, was simply an
establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with London that
was not of course measurable at the moment--I saw in my bedazzled state
of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly
intoxicated vision of choice and range--but that none the less set going
a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and
led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in
possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval
than I could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble
of after years brought surprisingly to light. I think it must have been
the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that
kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of
calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party
to our relation, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed and
spread--much too mighty a Goliath for the present in any conceivable
ambition even of a fast-growing David. My earlier apprehension, fed at
the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons--for these all
shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality--piled up the
monster to such a height that I could somehow only fear him as much as I
admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my
expectation. He was always the great figure of London, and I was for no
small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance
for taking him on that sort of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I
had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the
most part the mere question of whether I should ever be big enough to so
much as guess where he stopped?
Odd enough was it, I make out, that I was to feel no wonder of that kind
or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such
superficially more colourable scenes as I paid, in repetition as
frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet
me with wreathed smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of
my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that I couldn't
pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally
widened, of which Half-Moon Street was the centre, and nothing therefore
could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied
assurances. What it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise
to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance,
and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning
and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from
prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little
crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own
action perhaps could make good. It was as if I had seen that all there
was for me of these great things I should sooner or later take; the
amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane
and the same connection, the æsthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in
the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the
intelligence. What other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal
or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, I must have
felt involved in the question of an effective experience of English life
I was doubtless then altogether unprepared to say; it probably came,
however, I seem actually to make out, very much to this particular
perception, exactly, that any penetration of the London scene would _be_
experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual
curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the
rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly
appear. On the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than
a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in
the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self
carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with
them--this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and
wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably
exhausting the relation.