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The Awkward Age
The Awkward Age
James, Henry
Published: 1899
Type(s): Novels
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org
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About James:
Henry James, son of theologian Henry James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psy-
chologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary
critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe and be-
came a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for novels, novellas
and short stories based on themes of consciousness and morality.
James significantly contributed to the criticism of fiction, particularly in his insistence
that writers be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world.
His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators
in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An ex-
traordinarily productive writer, he published substantive books of travel writing, biography,
autobiography and visual arts criticism.
Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for James:
• Hawthorne (1879)
• Daisy Miller (1879)
• The Bostonians (1886)
• Wings of the Dove (1902)
• The Golden Bowl (1904)
• The Ambassadors (1903)
Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.
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Preface
I recall with perfect ease the idea in which "The Awkward Age" had its origin, but re-per-
usal gives me pause in respect to naming it. This composition, as it stands, makes, to my
vision—and will have made perhaps still more to that of its readers—so considerable a mass
beside the germ sunk in it and still possibly distinguishable, that I am half- moved to leave
my small secret undivulged. I shall encounter, I think, in the course of this copious com-
mentary, no better example, and none on behalf of which I shall venture to invite more in-
terest, of the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and de-
velop and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour it. I say all, surely, when I
speak of the thing as planned, in perfect good faith, for brevity, for levity, for simplicity, for
jocosity, in fine, and for an accommodating irony. I invoked, for my protection, the spirit of
the lightest comedy, but "The Awkward Age" was to belong, in the event, to a group of pro-
ductions, here re-introduced, which have in common, to their author's eyes, the endearing
sign that they asserted in each case an unforeseen principle of growth. They were projected
as small things, yet had finally to be provided for as comparative monsters. That is my own
title for them, though I should perhaps resent it if applied by another critic—above all in the
case of the piece before us, the careful measure of which I have just freshly taken. The res-
ult of this consideration has been in the first place to render sharp for me again the interest
of the whole process thus illustrated, and in the second quite to place me on unexpectedly
good terms with the work itself. As I scan my list I encounter none the "history" of which
embodies a greater number of curious truths—or of truths at least by which I find contem-
plation more enlivened. The thing done and dismissed has ever, at the best, for the ambi-
tious workman, a trick of looking dead, if not buried, so that he almost throbs with ecstasy
when, on an anxious review, the flush of life reappears. It is verily on recognising that flush
on a whole side of "The Awkward Age" that I brand it all, but ever so tenderly, as mon-
strous—which is but my way of noting the QUANTITY of finish it stows away. Since I speak
so undauntedly, when need is, of the value of composition, I shall not beat about the bush to
claim for these pages the maximum of that advantage. If such a feat be possible in this field
as really taking a lesson from one's own adventure I feel I have now not failed of it—to so
much more demonstration of my profit than I can hope to carry through do I find myself
urged. Thus it is that, still with a remnant of self-respect, or at least of sanity, one may turn
to complacency, one may linger with pride. Let my pride provoke a frown till I justify it;
which—though with more matters to be noted here than I have room for I shall accordingly
proceed to do.
Yet I must first make a brave face, no doubt, and present in its native humility my scant
but quite ponderable germ. The seed sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and
concrete images which calls itself, for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of
the minor "social phenomena" with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the
trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it might pass for a
round ripe plum, the note one had inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain
friendly houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often
delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some vague slip of a daughter.
For such mild revolutions as these not, to one's imagination, to remain mild one had had, I
dare say, to be infinitely addicted to "noticing"; under the rule of that secret vice or that un-
fair advantage, at any rate, the "sitting downstairs," from a given date, of the merciless
maiden previously perched aloft could easily be felt as a crisis. This crisis, and the sense for
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it in those whom it most concerns, has to confess itself courageously the prime propulsive
force of "The Awkward Age." Such a matter might well make a scant show for a "thick
book," and no thick book, but just a quite charmingly thin one, was in fact originally dreamt
of. For its proposed scale the little idea seemed happy—happy, that is, above all in having
come very straight; but its proposed scale was the limit of a small square canvas. One had
been present again and again at the exhibition I refer to—which is what I mean by the
"coming straight" of this particular London impression; yet one was (and through fallibilit-
ies that after all had their sweetness, so that one would on the whole rather have kept them
than parted with them) still capable of so false a measurement. When I think indeed of
those of my many false measurements that have resulted, after much anguish, in decent
symmetries, I find the whole case, I profess, a theme for the philosopher. The little ideas one
wouldn't have treated save for the design of keeping them small, the developed situations
that one would never with malice prepense have undertaken, the long stories that had thor-
oughly meant to be short, the short subjects that had underhandedly plotted to be long, the
hypocrisy of modest beginnings, the audacity of misplaced middles, the triumph of inten-
tions never entertained—with these patches, as I look about, I see my experience paved: an
experience to which nothing is wanting save, I confess, some grasp of its final lesson.
This lesson would, if operative, surely provide some law for the recognition, the determin-
ation in advance, of the just limits and the just extent of the situation, ANY situation, that
appeals, and that yet, by the presumable, the helpful law of situations, must have its re-
serves as well as its promises. The storyteller considers it because it promises, and under-
takes it, often, just because also making out, as he believes, where the promise conveniently
drops. The promise, for instance, of the case I have just named, the case of the account to be
taken, in a circle of free talk, of a new and innocent, a wholly unacclimatised presence, as to
which such accommodations have never had to come up, might well have appeared as lim-
ited as it was lively; and if these pages were not before us to register my illusion I should
never have made a braver claim for it. They themselves admonish me, however, in fifty in-
teresting ways, and they especially emphasise that truth of the vanity of the a priori test of
what an idee-mere may have to give. The truth is that what a happy thought has to give de-
pends immensely on the general turn of the mind capable of it, and on the fact that its loyal
entertainer, cultivating fondly its possible relations and extensions, the bright efflorescence
latent in it, but having to take other things in their order too, is terribly at the mercy of his
mind. That organ has only to exhale, in its degree, a fostering tropic air in order to produce
complications almost beyond reckoning. The trap laid for his superficial convenience resides
in the fact that, though the relations of a human figure or a social occurrence are what
make such objects interesting, they also make them, to the same tune, difficult to isolate, to
surround with the sharp black line, to frame in the square, the circle, the charming oval,
that helps any arrangement of objects to become a picture. The storyteller has but to have
been condemned by nature to a liberally amused and beguiled, a richly sophisticated, view
of relations and a fine inquisitive speculative sense for them, to find himself at moments
flounder in a deep warm jungle. These are the moments at which he recalls ruefully that the
great merit of such and such a small case, the merit for his particular advised use, had been
precisely in the smallness.
I may say at once that this had seemed to me, under the first flush of recognition, the
good mark for the pretty notion of the "free circle" put about by having, of a sudden, an in-
genuous mind and a pair of limpid searching eyes to count with. Half the attraction was in
the current actuality of the thing: repeatedly, right and left, as I have said, one had seen
such a drama constituted, and always to the effect of proposing to the interested view one of
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those questions that are of the essence of drama: what will happen, who suffer, who not suf-
fer, what turn be determined, what crisis created, what issue found? There had of course to
be, as a basis, the free circle, but this was material of that admirable order with which the
good London never leaves its true lover and believer long unprovided. One could count them
on one's fingers (an abundant allowance), the liberal firesides beyond the wide glow of
which, in a comparative dimness, female adolescence hovered and waited. The wide glow
was bright, was favourable to "real" talk, to play of mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due
demonstration of the interest by persons I qualified to feel it: all of which meant frankness
and ease, the perfection, almost, as it were, of intercourse, and a tone as far as possible re-
moved from that of the nursery and the schoolroom—as far as possible removed even, no
doubt, in its appealing "modernity," from that of supposedly privileged scenes of conversa-
tion twenty years ago. The charm was, with a hundred other things, in the freedom—the
freedom menaced by the inevitable irruption of the ingenuous mind; whereby, if the freedom
should be sacrificed, what would truly BECOME of the charm? The charm might be figured
as dear to members of the circle consciously contributing to it, but it was none the less true
that some sacrifice in some quarter would have to be made, and what meditator worth his
salt could fail to hold his breath while waiting on the event? The ingenuous mind might, it
was true, be suppressed altogether, the general disconcertment averted either by some
master-stroke of diplomacy or some rude simplification; yet these were ugly matters, and in
the examples before one's eyes nothing ugly, nothing harsh or crude, had flourished. A girl
might be married off the day after her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove
her from the sphere of the play of mind; but these were exactly not crudities, and even then,
at the worst, an interval had to be bridged. "The Awkward Age" is precisely a study of one of
these curtailed or extended periods of tension and apprehension, an account of the manner
in which the resented interference with ancient liberties came to be in a particular instance
dealt with.
I note once again that I had not escaped seeing it actually and traceably dealt with—(I ad-
mit) a good deal of friendly suspense; also with the nature and degree of the "sacrifice" left
very much to one's appreciation. In circles highly civilised the great things, the real things,
the hard, the cruel and even the tender things, the true elements of any tension and true
facts of any crisis, have ever, for the outsider's, for the critic's use, to be translated into
terms—terms in the distinguished name of which, terms for the right employment of which,
more than one situation of the type I glance at had struck me as all irresistibly appealing.
There appeared in fact at moments no end to the things they said, the suggestions into
which they flowered; one of these latter in especial arriving at the highest intensity. Putting
vividly before one the perfect system on which the awkward age is handled in most other
European societies, it threw again into relief the inveterate English trick of the so morally
well-meant and so intellectually helpless compromise. We live notoriously, as I suppose
every age lives, in an "epoch of transition"; but it may still be said of the French for in-
stance, I assume, that their social scheme absolutely provides against awkwardness. That is
it would be, by this scheme, so infinitely awkward, so awkward beyond any patching-up, for
the hovering female young to be conceived as present at "good" talk, that their presence is,
theoretically at least, not permitted till their youth has been promptly corrected by mar-
riage—in which case they have ceased to be merely young. The better the talk prevailing in
any circle, accordingly, the more organised, the more complete, the element of precaution
and exclusion. Talk—giving the term a wide application—is one thing, and a proper inex-
perience another; and it has never occurred to a logical people that the interest of the great-
er, the general, need be sacrificed to that of the less, the particular. Such sacrifices strike
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