Henry James: Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others Notes of a Son and Brother The Middle Years Other Writings: Library of America #274 (The Library of America) by Henry James

Author:Henry James [James, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2016-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

IX

I WENT up from Newport to Cambridge early in the autumn of ’62, and on one of the oddest errands, I think, that, given the several circumstances, I could possibly have undertaken. I was nineteen years old, and it had seemed to me for some time past that some such step as my entering for instance the Harvard Law School more or less urgently concerned what I could but try to help myself out by still putting forward as my indispensable education—I am not sure indeed that the claim didn’t explicitly figure, or at least successfully dangle, as that of my possibly graceful mere “culture.” I had somehow—by which I mean for reasons quite sufficient—to fall back on the merciful “mere” for any statement of my pretensions even to myself: so little they seemed to fit into any scheme of the conventional maximum as compared with those I saw so variously and strongly asserted about me, especially since the outbreak of the War. I am not sure whether I yet made bold to say it, but I should surely be good for nothing, all my days, if not for projecting into the concrete, by hook or by crook—that is my imagination shamelessly aiding—some show of (again) mere life. This impression was not in the least the flag I publicly brandished; in fact I must have come as near as possible to brandishing none whatever, a sound instinct always hinting to me, I gather, that the time for such a performance was much more after than before—before the perfect place had been found for the real planting of the standard and the giving of its folds to the air. No such happy spot had been marked, decidedly, at that period, to my inquiring eye; in consequence of which the emblazoned morsel (hoisted sooner or later by all of us, I think, somehow and somewhere), might have passed for the hour as a light extravagant bandanna rolled into the tight ball that fits it for hiding in the pocket. There it considerably stayed, so far as I was concerned; and all the more easily as I can but have felt how little any particular thing I might meanwhile “do” would matter—save for some specious appearance in it. This last, I recognise, had for me a virtue—principally that of somehow gaining time; though I hasten to add that my approach to the Law School can scarcely, as a means to this end, in the air of it that comes back to me, have been in the least deceptive. By which I mean that my appearance of intentions, qualifications, possibilities, or whatever else, in the connection, hadn’t surely so much as the grace of the specious. I spoke above of the assumed “indispensability” of some show of my being further subject to the “education” theory, but this was for the moment only under failure to ask to whom, or for what, such a tribute was indispensable. The interest to myself would seem to have

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