This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
BY
HENRY JAMES
MACMILLANAND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET,LONDON
1922
PRINTED INGREAT BRITAIN
I have gathered into this volume several short fictions of thetype I have already found it convenient to refer to as“international”—though I freely recognise,before the array of my productions, of whatever length andwhatever brevity, the general applicability of that term. On the interest of contrasted things any painter of lifeand manners inevitably much depends, and contrast, fortunatelyfor him, is easy to seek and to recognise; the only difficulty isin presenting it again with effect, in extracting from it itssense and its lesson. The reader of these volumes willcertainly see it offered in no form so frequent or so salient asthat of the opposition of aspects from country to country. Their author, I am quite aware, would seem struck with nopossibility of contrast in the human lot so great as thatencountered as we turn back and forth between the distinctivelyAmerican and the distinctively European outlook. He mighteven perhaps on such a showing be represented as scarce aware,before the human scene, of any other sharp antithesis atall. He is far from denying that this one has always beenvivid for him; yet there are cases in which, however obvious andhowever contributive, its office for the particular demonstrationhas been quite secondary, and in which the work is by no meansmerely addressed to the illustration of it. These thingshave p. vihadin the latter case their proper subject: as, for instance, thesubject of “The Wings of the Dove,” or that of“The Golden Bowl,” has not been the exhibitedbehaviour of certain Americans as Americans, of certain Englishpersons as English, of certain Romans as Romans. Americans,Englishmen, Romans are, in the whole matter, agents or victims;but this is in virtue of an association nowadays so developed, soeasily to be taken for granted, as to have created a new scale ofrelations altogether, a state of things from whichemphasised internationalism has either quite dropped or iswell on its way to drop. The dramatic side of humansituations subsists of course on contrast; and when we come tothe two novels I have just named we shall see, for example, justhow they positively provide themselves with that source ofinterest. We shall see nevertheless at the same time thatthe subject could in each case have been perfectly expressed hadall the persons concerned been only American or onlyEnglish or only Roman or whatever.
If it be asked then, in this light, why they deviate from thatnatural harmony, why the author resorts to the greaterextravagance when the less would serve, the answer is simply thatthe course taken has been, on reflexion, the course of thegreater amusement. That is an explanation adequate, Iadmit, only when itself a little explained—but I shall havedue occasion to explain it. Let me for the moment merelynote that the very condition I here glance at—that of theachieved social fusion, say, without the sense and experience ofwhich neither “The Wings of the Dove,” nor “TheGolden Bowl,” nor “The