The title of this essay, not to mention its focus on Henry Jamess early letters, signal something of a departure for a scholar who has, for many years, worked almost exclusively on old Henry Jamesthe post-1895 James, that is, of the experimental, major and so-called fourth phases. With my center of intellectual gravity originally located in British modernism, its probably not surprising that the nineteenth-century American James has been more often than not peripheral to my vision. And yet the child is, after all, father to the man. The Master who spent several years late in life revisiting, rethinking, and revising his own youthful avatars for the New York Edition was also engaged in a sustained meditation on the pieties, natural and otherwise, that bind age to youth.
