When Henry James, Jr., wrote his memoirs in his late sixties, he was surprised at the number of times he could recall accompanying his father away from home – he alone without any of the other four children (Small Boy 68). The aging son interpreted this public father-and-son companionship as an odd reflection of mid-nineteenth-century American manners, but I should like to propose an alternative interpretation: The father wanted his second son, his namesake, to inherit his own sense of social life. Henry Sr. would show the public world to Henry Jr., and explain it to him.

The impression the younger Henry gives of his father in the two volumes of memoirs, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, does not wholly agree with what one can learn about this father from other sources, especially his own writing. The son drew a portrait of a man devoted to a doomed, yet heroic, intellectual labor. The senior James never succeeded in getting anyone to believe in him, or really listen to him, but he never lost heart. He was a droll Olympian, completely without pomp or public honors, a magnificent man and father. He would not force his cherished ideas on his children, and yet these ideas saturated the home and rendered it all the more sacred. Convert the literal into the symbolic and spiritual, Henry Jr. remembered being taught. Scorn moralistic thought. Don't be selfish. Be social (Notes of a Son ch. 6).