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"Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"1
"Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your age, too different from you!"2
IT IS NO SURPRISE that Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) has attracted interest from the field of aging studies, for we might describe Dorian as terminally young. Inspired by Lord Henry Wotton's paean to youth, Dorian attaches himself so intensely to Basil's painting of his young visage that he becomes that image. Because the text treats the results of this attachment to youth as nightmarish even as it also indulges in rhetorical celebrations of youthful beauty, scholars have found much purchase in Wilde's novel as a reflection of the tensions in late-Victorian conceptions of aging.3 By contrast, Henry James's representation of aging has received comparatively little attention.4 James might seem at first to be an unpromising figure for aging studies: as an author associated traditionally with renunciation plots and narratives of tragically wasted opportunity, James does not obviously cut a figure in line with the desire to locate nuanced representations of older people. And yet James has also long been associated with the "religion of consciousness" and the possibility that conscious perception builds upon itself indefinitely. More specifically, in The Ambassadors (1903), James responds to and echoes Lord Henry Wotton's famous sermon on youth. In each work, an older man, in a garden setting, delivers a monologue to a younger man, telling him to cherish his youth, seize the day, and live all he can. But James shifts the perspective and emphasis of the garden speech, focusing on the subjectivity of the older speaker instead of the younger listener. This shift signals a general strategy in The Ambassadors, whereby the sensuous intensity Wilde attributes to youth is picked up and transplanted into the more mediated and contextualized garden of middle age. Such a realignment of aesthetic experience and perception with an older, "mature" consciousness not only reverses many conventional tropes about aging, but also reimagines...