THE
MIDDLE YEARS
BY
HENRY JAMES
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published November, 1917
From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and FryHenry 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 |
| I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII |
EDITOR'S NOTE
The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of avolume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the nameof one of his own short stories, The Middle Years. It was designed tofollow on Notes of a Son and Brother and to extend to about the samelength. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year andwere not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have beencorrected and the marking of the paragraphs—which he usually deferredtill the final revision—has been completed.
In dictating The Middle Years he used no notes, and beyond anallusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indicationof the course which the book would have taken or the precise period itwas intended to cover.
PERCY LUBBOCK.
I
If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[1] that anevent occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he ismoved 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—soshifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time tomany different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easilyto be young, for all life at the same time: youth is an army, thewhole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions andour illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy'scountry, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think itthrows out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishersahead—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 figureit is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment ofthe large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, assomething i